An atheist and a pope walk into a bar ...

Moss (00:18) Hi, I'm Moss and you are here as witness to episode four of Going Human because robots can't.

This episode's called An Atheist and a Pope Walk Into a Bar. And the punchline, which is often expected at the end of an opener like that, is not going to happen on this episode because there's nothing really funny about the subject matter I'm here to talk about today. You're gonna learn a lot about my journey around religion that started when I was a very young man.

during this episode, but I assure you that this is not a r episode squarely about religion.

I'm using the Pope as a foil in this episode to help us all understand the ways in which our belief systems ground us and make us reflect on those things around us in a way that is either positive and human forward or not. And again.

This is a podcast about the intersection of AI and our humanity.

So it feels really fitting that my first pillar episode that is the meaning pillar approach AI through the lens of a religious perspective.

So here we go. I'm going to start this episode as I often do. I'm gonna try and put you in a room. This time I'm putting you in a bar. It's a bit of divy bar, not too fancy. Imagine yourself in a New York street, a little nondescript door that you can walk in. It's really dark in there. There's no windows. And

There's not a soul in the place but one person sitting at the bar at the counter, and the barkeep behind the counter scrubbing the lipstick off of a semi washed glass that's been through the dishwasher but doesn't quite pass muster.

Of course, I walk in the atheist.

And a personalist and a humanist and a conversationalist, I naturally sit two seats away from the only other person in the establishment, and I look over and it's the Pope. Pope Leo. Now I'm not a big Pope follower. I just know that the papacy has seen a few in my day, not a lot. Pope Leo appears to be really striking a chord with.

the modern age. And I think that that can be a very helpful thing for those who follow them.

But so here we are. I'm sitting beside this very cool dude called the Pope.

I order a drink and it's it's the same drink he's drinking. And I'm thinking to myself, Wow, we have actually something in common. It's stupid. We're drinking the same liquids right next to each other in the same bar. Nobody else is around us. We must have something in common.

And that's the room I want you to feel yourself in as we walk through what I'm gonna call a labyrinth of relationship in meaning and relationship to meaning. Because I think AI is doing us all a big disservice by taking our hearts away from each other.

So that's the punchline. An atheist and a pope walk into a bar, we order the same drink, and neither one of us is laughing.

The Pope uses words like wrong and sin, and he looks up from his floor. I say wrong and I point out at the people at the people who created the situation that we're finding ourselves in and are having to sort out in real time.

So I'm gonna set the ground stage here so that you understand my perspective. I am not a God hater, I'm not a Jesus hater, I'm not even a true Christian or Catholic or Muslim or any religious follower hater at all.

I'll get into where I have difficulty with religion later, but first I want you to understand where I am with religion. I didn't leave God from a debate club and a winning an argument. It's not a fashion for me that I developed over COVID with isolation and not understanding myself. I'm not trying to sound clever on podcasts.

I just left because I watched the church kill people. I see the church kill people all the time.

And I think the church owes it to all of us to own up to that. But they don't.

They use religion to separate people.

And as a non scholar of religion, I can tell you that Jesus would have never meant for that to be his outcome.

That should God ever enter the room, I think he would

Have strong words for all of us.

If the love that we can show is only to the people who look and feel and smell and talk and act exactly like us

We're really just a fertile ground for hatred.

I've had friends commit suicide because their churches cast them away, because their families wouldn't talk to them anymore.

I know many trans individuals today who are struggling day to day with suicidal tendencies and I spend my days, weeks, and months just hoping that they can fight through it and that they don't do it.

But equality and humanity and dignity, these are not religious gifts.

These are not religious gifts.

So I ended up spending the majority of my young adult life subtracting the word sin out of the church's mouth through my own lens.

It took me a while but I but I got to the point where never letting a church tell me what's wrong was my salvation.

I was one of those young boys who was gay, alone, living in a very liberal, non religious family, but still scared of what would become of me, thinking maybe it wouldn't be real worth it to keep going.

So as I look at things that aren't right.

And I hear the Pope point them out too.

I wanna find out what we have in common. I wanna find out what it is that he reaches for that helps him find reconciliation. And I want to make sure that I can identify for myself what that is as well.

My whole life.

I spent my time refusing to let a church tell me what's a sin, and here I am, staring at a rented girlfriend, reaching for the same word.

Here's the thing.

When you don't cast tens, hundreds of million of people aside with your fake Jesus talk.

Your heart starts to enter the room and you can really understand what's going on.

I say that not as a threat, but as a reality. And I'm gonna prove it to you right now by helping you understand this is not a fringe story that I'm talking with you about today.

This is loneliness.

Despair sadness shame guilt.

What we're talking about today and what the Pope responded to in his very first open letter, which focused pretty heavily on AI.

is companion apps. And I've mentioned them before on prior episodes, but we're gonna drill a little deeper into them today.

In twenty twenty five there were fifty million people on AI companion apps. So to just set the stage, a companion app is a chat bot that either through voice synthesis or tapping with their thumbs

can become a friend, a confidant.

There's a company called Replica who who's who's one of the bigger players here. R. E. P. L I K A. They alone have twenty million of these people. One company.

The report says sixty-eight percent of the people that have these companions open their open their app every single day. So TikTok, you know, TikTok was built to be sticky. They can only make money if people come back, stay on, and doom scroll until they're bleary eyed and can't hold their head up anymore.

Sixty eight percent is more than TikTok gets. So put that in some context as you're trying to understand the enormity of what it is we're talking about here. One in five of these people are under twenty one.

So for those of you who might be thinking about these numbers and looking at the prospect that they're

majority elderly people whose friends have all died and or older divorcees who are having difficulty finding friends. There's probably many of those. And that's a different category of loneliness that we can also talk about.

But if people under twenty-one are finding that their best relationships that are most consistent

Or behind a piece of glass and driven by servers, sitting in the middle of some field in the Midwest.

That's a little scary to me. The age gates say no one under eighteen, but we all know what VPNs can do to stuff like that, and those very difficult to traverse messages on websites that say you must be eighteen. Click this button if you are.

Yeah, there's not a lot of people under eighteen who are sitting there shivering in their shivering in their shoes over those warnings. Surgeon General, this guy, you know, not a big fan of this guy generally, but you know, to not call this loneliness paradigm a massive epidemic would be malpractice. And thank Buddha he did.

But that just gives you an a an indication that, you know, it's not that fringe to take a perspective that loneliness is a problem that's affecting us all and it's shaping the way we're driving some of our biggest decisions in our lives. The big the big stat is sixty-one percent of Americans.

articulate loneliness as one of their most intractable problems.

Sixty one percent.

of Americans, when asked, will say that loneliness is one of the problems that they can't fix for themselves.

Okay, so I want to be honest and transparent with you. The Pope wrote his first big letter. It is about AI. That is a fact. His warning machines are standing in for people. That is factual. He named the wound, which is loneliness and addiction.

Loneliness and addiction and his answer The word made flesh bodies in a room meaning together.

I just want to be clear, he never wrote girlfriend or rented girlfriend or any of that. This is this is my contraction. And it's a contraction that's intends to make a point, not to not to cite words from somebody. Words that they didn't say. So I just want to be really clear about that. So

I'm sitting next to the Pope. I'm in the bar.

We're sipping our drinks.

And I ask him how he sits with all this and and he proceeds to tell me some things that make me realize that, you know, his floor, the one that's under both of us, but his version of his floor, the one that tells him.

how his values and his behaviors manifest in humanity. That floor. That floor was handed down from his God.

He learned about it, likely as a very young man, if not from birth. And he's lived with it his whole life.

That ladder that gets you up there to God, I I threw that away a long time ago on purpose.

And it's not to say again that there's any damnation or hellfire that I think is gonna come to anybody who doesn't think like me.

It's just not for me.

But my floor

The thinking one that I sit on every day that makes me want answers. I don't go to a book that was written thousands of years ago to try and find those answers written from people who didn't suffer the complexities that we're suffering today.

I look at the world outward. I look at the people outward.

And what I see what I think makes this wrong is that it's grief.

It's sadness. It's isolation.

And it's all packaged up by companies like Replica on a monthly subscription.

monthly subscription holding us, cradling us, keeping us alone.

The thing I want to make sure everybody understands, if you don't already, many of us have had people leave us. Many of us have had to make the choice to leave others, whether it was a friend in grade school, a first boyfriend or girlfriend, friend as an adult, some of us have to leave our family, our brothers, sisters, and parents.

The sign of a relationship

Is an interaction model where

Nobody has to stay. We can leave. We can make a choice that's healthy for us.

Now, we may make that choice that's healthy for us in the wrong ways, and we may execute it in ways that are abhorrent. That's not what we're talking about here. I'm talking about real relationships. I'm talking about the ones that I ended too soon, or in ways that weren't whole.

In ways that left one or both of us.

A little bit worse off.

But the point is that that is a relationship.

And the risk and bravery that we have to enter these relationships with is humanity.

Being in a relationship that you can leave but you don't?

That is a relationship.

Being in a relationship that's wired to keep you no matter what, well, that's not a relationship. That's a mirror with a voice and the voice isn't human.

Mirror with a voice isn't human.

The machine can't leave.

Not that it would want to, it's been coded to stay as long as you'll watch it and talk to it. That's not the feature though. That's the wound. And it's the wound that falls prey on those of us who are really deep in it. So

That's my stone today, fellow humans. The sadness of the of the moment, the loneliness that we are entrenching further and further by telling people they are bad or wrong or

Mean or ugly or

And then relegating them to fear and anger.

You know, fear is the most potent ingredient.

on planet earth. It's it's something that we have spent since the beginning of time.

untangling and taming so that we didn't have issues with it.

Бо ви осознали до мощ.

The most horrible things.

So I ask you to think about everybody in your life who you disagree with or who you may not see eye to eye with in some of the most important ways for you.

And just take a deep breath.

Think about how much your views are shaped by fear.

And see if you can own some of that before you look them in the heart.

Because I think when you can see your own fears driving your pain.

The optics of somebody else's fears and their pain become far clearer.

Okay, so that's my stone. I'm sorry I'm feeling a little overly preachy today, but I hope it's not translating that way.

Without a guest here to do my ripples with, I'm just gonna do a little ripple on my own. It's gonna be short. you know, this is where I'm just gonna be a little bit point counterpoint on this whole thing, because you know, replica and those companies, they all have their marketing materials, they all have ways to tell you why their existence is important and and some of them are valid.

I don't know if anybody out there has experienced a loved one or somebody who they knew well enough.

To know that they were that they had a condition called agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is, and I'm not a this isn't a DSM diagnosis or explanation, but essentially agoraphobia is is a mortal fear of leaving your home.

And that mortal fear of leaving your home is obviously quite irrational, but it's delivered.

Through a lot of means and you don't have to be a religious person to have fear, anxiety, and panic attacks keep you from exposing yourself to stimulus that might bring them on. So that's agoraphobia.

And that's one of my first access exceptions to this kind of technology, right? There are use cases and situations where if scaffolded right and guardrailed right, we can do meaningful things with stuff like this. So one example is the agoraphobic housebound person who hadn't talked.

to anyone or anything in years.

finding out about AI and downloading one of these companion apps and they started having interactions again.

Now, what would the Pope say about this? As I turn and take a sip from my drink? Well, the Pope would say come to church.

We'll hold you. Your community is here.

Now, I don't think the church goes to a lot of the churches in I'm sorry, I don't think the Pope goes to a lot of churches in America because here you have to belong to a mega church that has only people like you. there are exceptions, of course, but

Churches aren't all accepting, and they certainly aren't all enfolding.

They're definitely good at getting donations.

But this person got talking again.

Now, a natural extension to this would be to say this is a bridge that that giving this person an off ramp is is the value and it should be.

But the AI's not wired to get this person to a certain point and say, Okay, I'm gonna give you some homework. Why don't you walk around the block right now? Leave your phone at home, just walk around the block. Don't look anyone in the eye. Just walk around the block.

Come back, tell me how it goes.

AI's not gonna do that ever.

Never. Not unless we understand this epidemic well enough to say that curing conditions like agoraphobia can't be done casually just because a technology has a capacity for it.

But that's a positive aspect of what these companion apps have the capacity to be delivered to do. Another one, you know, kids, how many of us were young and and couldn't couldn't fathom walking up to somebody and say, I really like you. Could could we hang out after school?

Even as young as playdate age when we used that language, I had incredible anxiety about being told no when I asked people to play with me.

Teenage years. my God. Crazy, crazy teenage years.

But there's an example out there, or nineteen or nineteen hundred, where that shy kid got the nerve to ask somebody out on a first date.

That's an example, if encouraged by AI directly, where the technology can really be a bridge to humans and not a bridge that you're stuck on.

The tragedy isn't using a bridge to reach people, it's just mistaking that bridge for a destination.

A bridge you never cross it's perhaps only a nicer place to be alone.

But it's not your connection to your humanity.

Okay. That's the heavy part of the show for you, and I appreciate you putting up with me and it as you have. we're gonna go into the maelstrom now. Maelstrom is also what I call fuckery. Maelstrom is just a aquatic term, a water term for tumultuous craziness. and

And that's kind of what I consider modern day newsfeeds to feel like, especially as relates to subject matter like AI, where up, down, backwards, sideways we're getting so much information and it's really hard to sort through it. So Maelstrom slash fuckery for me on this podcast, it's just a way for me to expose you to some stories. I'll tell you what I think, good, bad, or ugly. a fuck yes.

Good things, fuck no, bad things, and a fuck maybe I'll expose you to my website so you can come and do your own vote. From time to time, we'll promote the fuck maybes into either bucket based upon our community's votes. but let's get started here. I have a a great a great fuck yes, which seems weird because it's related to a government. But it's kind of great.

Right. So how many of us have done anything with a government agency where we're sitting there just rolling our eyes, thinking to ourselves

Way back in the sixties or seventies, late sixties, I think, we sent a man to the moon. And here we are in twenty twenty six, and somebody is giving me a five page form to fill out. Three of those pages. I have to write information that I know they have in their screen on a piece of paper. How many of us have been there? It's just crazy.

Well, my fuck yes is California just did the biggest government AI rollout. And I'll say in US history, but it's only because AI has only been up for a couple of years. but it's still humongous, really big.

So they have vetted assistants across state services that are doing amazing things at rapid paces with pinpoint accuracy and with guardrails to protect privacy and the state of your data. So it's a boring fuck yes. yeah, you mean somebody's actually doing something that they should have done 30 years ago? Yeah.

Somebody is. And it's a big, it's a big entity. The state of California is one of the largest regional economies on the planet. the GDP of California is cray cray. And and the the the administrative blast radius of it is huge. So the fact that they've done this, it's boring as fuck, but it's fuck yes because

If we're gonna apply AI to anything, it should be to lubricate those services that are in service to the humans struggling to live. And California state government answered the call and hats off to you, California. I used to live there and I was born and raised there. And it's nice to see you do something really groundbreaking.

Okay, so now we get to the fuck no fuck no fuck no. Okay. my fuck no this week is deep fake scams. I mentioned this in the last one, but it's just starting to really hit the news in high volume. So

The research that I did indicates that in twenty twenty five, sixty-eight billion dollars was lost.

From normal people like you and me through deep through AI deepfake scams. Sixty eight billion dollars.

That's a lot of money.

It's a hundred and eighty-six million dollars stolen from people like us every single day. It clones your kid's voice, your boss's face, all kinds of shit.

And the theft is aimed right at our trust bones. It's aimed right at that part of us that wants to do the right thing, that's really afraid that if we fuck up and don't, that we're gonna get in bigger trouble.

In my mind.

government that doesn't recognize this as one of its largest

Criminal problems.

and work to regulate the industries that enable it and work to enforce the laws that inhibit it.

If we have a government that's not willing to stand on those premises and allow this level

Of fraudulence to continue, then every single soul in our state and federal governments.

are benefiting financially from this technology.

And are betting that if they do anything to rein it in, their little cash cow is gonna stop stop flowing to their coffers. It's the only explanation. Because there's not one of those people that doesn't have a father or a daughter or a son or a grandma or a cousin or an aunt who's vulnerable.

So that's my fuck no. And I'll fucky fuck fuck fuck anybody who wants to argue with me about that because that is just fucked up. Okay. Sorry, I get fucky. okay, so here we are with our fuck maybe and and I really want the fuck maybe to be a dialogue in our minds and in our hearts.

we all know that AI takes an inordinate amount of electrical energy in order to run the server farms that power these very, very sophisticated chips and and servers that hold them. But you know, we're we're not able to power AI on our current grids at the forecasted

Growth that we are pushing. So we have all of this dubiously great stuff happening in AI. Fuck yes, fuck no. We got great things, we got bad things. We got digital girlfriends. They're good for some people, but not for everybody. But we have some basic needs. We need clean water.

AI power farms are putting that in jeopardy. We need clean air. Ditto.

We also need to be able to afford the power in our own homes so that we can watch our news and we can run our blender and we can cook our eggs.

The cost of electricity is going up because of AI.

Those among us who have the least money are being saddled with more expense.

So here's my fuck maybe. There are communities and towns that are banning new AI data centers. Just outright. They're saying you can you can file a permit, but we're gonna say no, right? Residents are revolting over their water, getting gross, the noise of these power plants, the power bills. It's becoming a big thing and it should.

So do we want more power?

Do we wanna power AI? Do we want this big experiment called AI that is isolating people more and and probably enabling the biggest fraud schemes on planet Earth to rip what little we have away from us unsuspectingly? Is that is this something that we all sign up for? I don't know.

But I do know that the promise of AI is bright and it does need electricity. So the point counterpoint on this one, on this fuck maybe, is you know, if I say no in my town, it's gonna get kicked down the curb.

And if the industrial resolution I'm human, I can't speak sometimes. If the industrial industrial revolution of the early twentieth century taught us anything, is that pollution and and the deterioration of environmental state of our local of our local areas always gets

push down to the poorest neighborhoods or the most or the most rural places where fewer people live.

But we also know that when that happens, it's not just well, fewer people are getting hurt by it, so it's better than putting it in the middle of everywhere.

We're hurting the environment. We have brownfield sites in this country that have been toxic for over a hundred years because of this. And it still sit toxic, uncleaned up.

So kicking the can down the road, in my mind, isn't the solution. If we're going to feed the hungry thing called AI with energy, we have to find a way to do it cleanly, reliably, and in ways that doesn't push people out of their communities.

And if the zero sum bet on AI is fuck you, go live where you can, because this is where this is going, then that's where I say fuck no to this fuck maybe. There you have my opinion. A little longer of an opinion than an opinion. It was kind of more like a diatribe, but there you have it. Okay.

We're gonna close out now and I really appreciate everybody's attention to my first solo episode. I'm I'm I'm I'm hoping these land well and I hope that I get better at them over time. But we're at tsunami time and I'll remind all the listeners that tsunami is the moment in this show where we close out and and and and we we pose a challenge to you for the next week.

I'm going to ask you to do something that touches you personally. And then as our listenership grows and more and more people

Take on these challenges and talk about them with their loved ones, connect with acquaintances about them. More and more of us will find something in common. More and more of us will find some humanity in our day-to-day. So here, here's our tsunami for the week.

Plan a walk with somebody that you like. Doesn't have to be a lover. It could, should, maybe, no shoulds. We don't like shoulds. But it could be a lover. It could be a could be your spouse of seventy years if you're old enough to still be walking. but it could also just be a friend from work. Holding hands isn't sexual.

shouldn't be read that way. Holding hands is connection.

Fraternity.

Go on a walk with somebody. It doesn't have to be a two-hour walk. It could be a walk around the block. And it could be a walk around the block to just hit your tsunami for the week.

But on this walk, tell this person that you're walking with that you want to hold their hand until you're done.

Talk around the block.

And feel their hand.

Maybe feel some sweat forming.

Maybe both of you will feel an urge to adjust the hand holding so it's just your fingers, a pinky.

Keep the connection for the duration of the walk.

And when you're done, just ask yourself, how awkward did that feel? And why? How good did it feel? And why? It's sort of stupid that we don't touch each other anymore.

Touch is not sexual.

Touch is human. That's our tsunami for the week. Touch somebody that you like. And do it just to feel what it's like to be touched and to touch them back.

All right, that's episode four of Going Human. I'm really happy to be evolving this idea and this show, and I hope to bring you a lot more great messaging and stuff in the future. Our website is goinghumanpod.com. you can reach all of our episodes on that website. There's blog content and

A lot of other sort of per episode reflection that you can read about if you're interested. You can also go to the ledger page on that site and see what the fuck yes, fuck no, fuck maybe excuse me, fuck maybes are and do your fuck maybe votes if you're interested. I do want to note that I do require people to log in with Google just because it keeps the bots at bay and

And you know, we don't store or do anything with your with your email address unless you ask us to put us on our mailing list. but it just it's just a way to keep the community whole. So just wanna make sure I set that expectation. Thank you very much. Again, this is Moss. This has been going human because robots can't.