Cyborgs & Society with Jason Sosa, Transhumanist Speaker and Innovation Consultant

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:04) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Jason, innovation consultant and transhumanist speaker. And they discuss how the younger generation's embracing of technology will impact society, ethical concerns surrounding genetic modification and cyborgs, and why understanding consciousness may be the next frontier. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Jason at 00:00:31) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) This is the Modern CTO podcast. I was just curious to start the basis of the conversation, what is transhumanism?

(Jason at 00:00:48) So transhumanism is the idea that man is merging with technology. Over the years, we've shortened the time. Thinking about the phone booth, right? If you had a business, you didn't stop and pick up the phone at the phone booth, call your secretary, get those messages. So we've shortened that distance. Over time, we were finding more and more dependency on technology, and it's creeping into our everyday lives. So it's extending now into money. It's gonna extend even into our own brains, and we'll find more and more that we'll have this greater dependency on technology. So it's really the next evolutionary shift in humanity. That's really what transhumanism is about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) How did you get into all of this?

(Jason at 00:01:25) Mostly because, well, growing up, you see the changes from this analog to digital world, and you start asking yourself these questions of what are the societal implications of robots that are coming out, that can do things that take out labor. So what happens to those people? What happens with the number of shifts that are occurring in the world? I think that's what really got me curious about this space. There's the technology side of it. There's the human side of it. And then there are these unintended consequences that can emerge from that. So businesses want to know about this because the future of work is a big part of how they need to anticipate labor and productivity. But there's also the future of education.

(Jason at 00:02:01) How do we train ourselves up when we're still basically doing the same things we did in the 1980s and '90s? How do we prepare students for a world of continual shifting change? So that really got me curious about this space and hopefully define some solutions, because I don't think it's really something we can debate the morality of it and the ethics of some of these technologies and whether we should or shouldn't. But to be honest, it's a freight train. It's not gonna stop.

(Jason at 00:02:27) So it's more of a question of how do we take this technology and understand the shifts that are occurring and how do we position ourselves?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:34) Right. Yeah, I'm a Christian, but there's a spectrum of Christians, right?

(Jason at 00:02:38) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:38) Being a technologist my whole life, I never liked this idea that everyone would be like, "Stop playing God," and things like that. I'm like, well, first of all, God made us, so any technology that we created, we're good. It's just how we're using that technology. And so I never really liked that argument holding technology back. I just didn't really identify with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) But I'm curious. You said there's several different problems that we're trying to solve, everything from what is it called? The income? What is it called?

(Jason at 00:03:06) Universal basic income.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) Universal basic income. So you talked a little bit about that. You talked about how we prepare our kids. You brought up a lot of different avenues to take the conversation. But one thing they all had in common is problems or solutions to the problems. Have we come up with anything that we agree on? Is there things that the transhumanism community fully agrees on?

(Jason at 00:03:26) I don't know if it's any one particular community. I think you have different branches of, again, any particular belief system or ideology. For some, it's a religion, and it's like the new Rapture, right? This technology will come and save us. To others, it's a menace that is trying to play God. So you have each side of the spectrum here of different beliefs of what this is. But like I mentioned before, this is coming. We can either be a part of it and try to direct where this technology goes and how we play a part in it, or we're carried away by it. There are a number of people that really see this as the next evolution of humanity, from being able to work with AI and how we make decisions.

(Jason at 00:04:04) What job should I take? Who should I marry? There's genetic things that we could be looking into, like life extension, designer babies. These are all technologies that are on the forefront that are coming over the next 20, 30 years. So we really need to be thinking about some of these things. And it's a little hard because as humans, we have a short time preference, usually one to two weeks. You know, what's right in front of me? And we don't have a really good mind. We haven't evolved to have a good mind for exponential thinking or for something that's much further away.

(Jason at 00:04:30) But if you're trying to plan an organization, if you're trying to build around a company, if you're trying to build a society, those are the, that's the kind of thinking that you really need to have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:37) And then how are you making money in this industry? Do people pay you to talk?

(Jason at 00:04:41) Oh, well, this is more so just a personal passion just because I do get paid to do some speeches, but most of the time I'm working as a fractional CTO, COO, CEO. So I'm a consultant. I work with startup companies and help them get funding, go through their due diligence process, prepare for investors, that kind of thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:59) Oh, nice. And then there's something that you do, like Immersive, or is that a partner thing? How does that work?

(Jason at 00:05:04) Yeah, Immersive was my first company. It was a Techstars company, venture backed, and that was around emotion recognition. So that was a computer vision software using web cameras that could detect your facial expressions. So that was the first company I had. I sold that in 2015.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:18) Oh, cool. Yeah. And then since then, you've just been doing a lot of consulting for different tech startups and—

(Jason at 00:05:22) Yes. I've worked in venture capital. So I was a management consultant for the last 15 years. I've worked with dozens of projects from VR headsets, wearable technology, 3D body scanning, nuclear medicine. You know, it's really the leading edge of what's going out there. That's where I'm really excited about. So I get to really look at a number of different sectors, different markets, work with different teams. And that's really helpful just for my own personal interest in what's happening with society, as I get to see what's on the forefront of all these technologies and where it's coming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:51) And that's awesome because that completely explains where you are today, because you got all that experience. And it's not like a hobby or interest when it's people's money on the line. You're doing extreme research into all of these. Now I'm curious to know, I'm 34, just to give you some context of watching things change over the course of my lifetime. Do you find that people are more open to these things now, as we get more technology in our lives and it becomes less mysterious, that they're more open to it?

(Jason at 00:06:20) So it's like the William Gibson quote, you know, the future is already here, just not evenly distributed. So there are some that fully embrace the cutting edge, and usually they're probably found in more cities. If you go to rural communities—I do spend a lot of time in rural communities—there's probably a greater fear because it's not well understood. There's not a lot of trust in tech companies. I think a lot of people in previous generations are more resistant to it. Younger generations are digital natives, so you have kids that are growing up with Roblox, Minecraft. They're familiar with digital environments and advocating your privacy and those kinds of things. I think it's really a generational shift. So you're getting younger kids that are used to commerce and digital platforms, identity, avatars. You know, that's something that I think older generations have a harder time with. They prefer tangibility.

(Jason at 00:07:05) And this even translates to money. You know, there's younger audiences tend to prefer digital money. So just like we had the transition from snail mail to email and fax machine to the internet and all these other things, we'll see that transition happen again. But we'll probably see that really spike as, you know, the older generation begins to die off. That wealth transfer goes from the boomers to these millennials, and then we'll see probably a different economic shift.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:30) Absolutely. It's super interesting. As I got older, I started to notice that there is some more rigidity in my thinking, and I'm like, oh, I don't want to be that guy. And then I thought to myself, well, humans die, so that's a positive. At least that'll transfer. And then I think to myself, there might be a time in our lifetimes where things like uploading consciousness or some form of technology that offers either extended lifetime or persistent lifetime actually exists. If you were to say that in the '50s or the '80s, you'd go into a mental institution, right? I mean, obviously, people wrote books about it and they were famous in the sci-fi community, but it was pretty far-fetched because most people didn't have much more than a refrigerator maybe in their house. But now it's like in the past 10 years—I think in your TED Talk you mentioned the iPhone from the first time to now is like 40 times more powerful or something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:20) And so we've gotten to see that in just over a decade, and so it's becoming super real. We're seeing this exponential curve, and we're getting towards the end of it, and we're watching it and it's happening super fast.

(Jason at 00:08:31) Yeah. It's getting smaller, faster, cheaper every decade. What we fit in our pocket will soon fit in a blood cell, and then we're really getting into this new age of technology where it is a merger of man and machine, whether these are nanobots cleaning our arteries or anything else that could come from that. So we are seeing the beginning of that, and I think Ray Kurzweil describes the year 2029 as this pivotal year. I think Elon Musk even referenced this recently, where artificial general intelligence will actually be a formidable threat or opportunity, depending how you look at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:00) A little bit of both.

(Jason at 00:09:01) A little bit of both.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:03) Yeah. It's like the whole scalpel argument, right? You can either kill somebody with it or save their life.

(Jason at 00:09:07) It's the invention of fire, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:09) Yes. That's one of the things that allowed me to relax a little bit. Because when I was first thinking about these topics a few years ago, I was like, oh man, one company is gonna create artificial intelligence. That thing's gonna be AGI. That thing will be dominant and own everything. But then what you realize is it's similar to most advancements, whether it's water filtration or electricity. They're happening in multiple areas and multiple countries by several different parties, and you end up with different variations of it. So it probably will be more decentralized than we sort of imagine it to be. I mean, right?

(Jason at 00:09:44) That's actually—when you look at the future, I think the things that probably concern me the most, we have the recipe for a dystopia, really. If you have, let's take a scenario that's probably easier for people to imagine. So let's say we have universal basic income. The government has a digital currency, a central bank digital currency. That UBI could have some stipulations. So it expires after three months or six months, or pick your time frame. If there is a crisis, well, you can't spend your money outside of your geographic region. They can go into your bank and seize it if they don't like your political opinion. So there are a number of different things that I think when you start tying technology and money and your personal sovereignty—is really what we're talking about here. And then when you start thinking about chips in your brain, you know, that goes to the next level, which is are your thoughts even your own? And I think we're experiencing that now as we point supercomputers at our face and we engage with TikTok and Twitter and Facebook and all these other social platforms.

(Jason at 00:10:41) And we're really noticing the manipulation of people en masse. So now it's really about how do we create a system that doesn't condone a boot on our neck as a dystopian society, where we have a social credit system, where we aren't allowed to travel, we aren't allowed to do certain things because we don't have those permissions in the societal operating system. So the real thing I've been looking toward are really truly decentralized systems that provide some level of sovereignty and autonomy for people so they can exist in this world without a central authority. We might have a benevolent administration at the moment, but that might not always be the case. So I think it's kind of—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:18) I don't think there's ever been a benevolent government in the history of humanity.

(Jason at 00:11:22) I agree. You know, we are in the days of the 1990s, and I think that we should start looking at the world with some more skepticism. And people are beginning to do that, but they need to find those alternatives. Where else do I look toward? You know, how do I get out of this hamster wheel, and what's the alternative, is the question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:39) Yeah. There's so many different things that are happening right now. It's not only the technology is exponential, but the amount of things happening in our lives right now, from, you know, the realization that we're a fairly split society, at least in the States. There's a lot of splitting going on in our social side of things, while at the same time there's crazy advancements in technology, while at the same time there's wars happening and unprecedented economic things happening. It's just there's a lot going on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:06) And, you know, to your point of being on the phone and everything, I sold all my stuff and bought a little farm in Tennessee. And we live out in the sticks now, but we still have fiber internet, which is great.

(Jason at 00:12:16) It's not a bad idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:17) To be honest, man, it's provided me so much, the animal side of me, so much peace and just putting the phone down and disconnecting. Do you think it's possible that we can have it all? We can both be AI'd in, but also have the peace of nature and—is that a possible future?

(Jason at 00:12:35) I think that's the future we really need to move toward. We have to find some kind of balance with our environment. This grow-at-all-costs mindset isn't sustainable. So we need to start looking at permaculture and how do we build an ecosystem within a community so you're not just relying on a supply chain from around the world. So we're starting to see more and more of that in communities that are coming around that, whether it's mushroom insulation, you know, can be used to make cheaper affordable housing that can provide labor that can be used to—these kinds of interdependencies that can be beneficial. This is where rural communities come in. So there's a lot of capital, a lot of talent in the cities, but they are dependent on the needs of food and land. And so it's really tying those two things together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:17) Yeah. And you'd be surprised, at least out here in the rural communities. It was one of the coolest interviews I got to do early on in the show. It was four or five years ago. Kevin Scott, who's the CTO of all of Microsoft. And I was asking him, what are you really interested in? And he was flying around the different rural communities and farms and exploring how they're using technology, from using cameras to count cows to technologies to water the correct amount to predicting yields and crops and all of this crazy stuff. And I think it's a cool thing that these rural areas, to do their work more efficiently, are adapting technology.

(Jason at 00:13:52) Yeah. It's a tool, right? So it's extending our reach. We have this amazing thing called imagination.

(Jason at 00:13:57) It's an insurance policy for the future. So I think we've really used technology as an extension of humanity, and we're unique as an animal in that. So I don't see a problem with it, but you're right. It's a double-edged sword. It can be used in both ways.

(Jason at 00:14:10) So it's really, I think, around the community and the culture that we can cultivate. But there is still a mentality of hustle, hustle, go make the money. But we're kind of living in two parallel realities. One where the world continues to prosper and go in the way that we have this normalcy bias and we hope it will go. The other alternative is we have this dystopia and war and food supply shortages.

(Jason at 00:14:32) And, you know, how do you kind of position yourself in this world to really benefit or at least survive in either scenario?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:38) Well, the answer is simple, my friend. Start a podcast, call it Modern CTO. Become friends with all the great technology people. Yeah. And then they can hack you out of the matrix in the future.

(Jason at 00:14:47) Yeah. You got a farm to go to, and you can raise cattle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:51) Yep. You got a farm to go to.

(Jason at 00:14:53) Food apocalypse hub.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:56) I want to talk a little bit more about universal basic income. So I explored that at first being a capitalist, knee-jerk reaction. Screw that. Right? But then researching and understanding how industries come and go throughout the course of humanity as new technologies are formed, industrial revolutions, et cetera, we've always had this problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:14) However, that's not a reason not to continue the conversation. We've always had a version of this problem. Now I believe it's amplified. Now I believe technology can come out that'll render an entire industry obsolete within a matter of a year or so. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:28) I think that's a possibility. Then when I see that, I'm like, alright, the structure or the framework for universal basic income, I think, could be super useful to sort of help the people transition. So I'm in an industry and it gets completely decimated by some AI system. I can have some sort of income while I learn and grow into a new industry that is emerging or whatever it may be. But I think a lot of people when they hear universal basic income, they think I'm going to give this person money forever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:59) And I think that kind of hurts the argument, but that's just my perspective of universal basic income, and I don't research it a whole lot. What are your thoughts on all that stuff I just said?

(Jason at 00:16:09) So from a very human perspective, I understand the need because the costs are rising greater than the wages. So let's say I walk by someone asking me for a petition for a $15 an hour minimum wage, and my thought is, okay, by the time this passes, the rate of inflation is going to make it so you're going to need to raise that up to 25. And by the time that passes, you're going to need it to go even higher.

(Jason at 00:16:30) So there's a couple of problems with the UBI that I see. One is that if you give someone an income, you're going to really kind of bifurcate society in a way. So, for example, as a company, those costs will be passed on to the consumers, but I'm also going to take into account the UBI that employee makes and deduct it from the price that I would normally pay them. So you're kind of abdicating that responsibility onto the government in a lot of the ways that, you know, Walmart has done that with health care for their workers. So I can see that happening also in finance.

(Jason at 00:17:00) The other thing I worry about is its ability to be used as a method of control. So if you look at food stamp programs, the stipulations on what you can and can't do, can't purchase, can't go, what you put in your body, all these other things are—it's a civil liberties issue of what our rights are and what that means to impoverished populations. So there is—really, it's a really complicated issue. Isn't it as simple as, yes, I'd like people to have free money, but what if that means that you don't have the freedoms that you would normally expect? What if that gets expired and you have no way to store that value?

(Jason at 00:17:30) You can look at even with the tax returns that come out. Right? So you have people that they get their tax returns. You see all these businesses say, hey, spend your tax return here. We'll give you a 10% discount, all that stuff. So you're going to have a whole industry that's really geared toward the immediate gratification of people that get that kind of income and how they can take it for themselves. So the issue I have is the bifurcation and really the—you know, what does that mean for the dollar when you're constantly printing more and more money and we don't have this endless supply? It actually hurts everyone. It is a complicated issue, but there's kind of the two sides of it, both at a macro level for civilization, but also on an individual level for those people that need food and they need to survive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:09) Absolutely. These are tough questions. These are huge, huge things that we need really smart people dealing with and probably not politicians.

(Jason at 00:18:17) They don't even know what technology is. They're like, how does this work?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:22) Dude, when I see those people interviewing Zuckerberg or, you know, Sergey or something like that, and they're 80 years old and their dentures are falling out and they're asking them analogies about—I'm like, man, we need an age limit on public service, my friend.

(Jason at 00:18:37) Yeah. Yeah. The way the system has been set up is it's too reactive and too slow. You know, technology moves far too fast for them to be able to legislate. So it's kind of what I've been looking at. Now the bleeding edge of technology is kind of an indicator of where things are going, and legislation tends to be the laggard. It catches up once it's already out of the barn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:55) Yes. And to that point, policy, I got to interview a guy named Zoltan.

(Jason at 00:18:59) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) Yeah. He has a documentary on transhumanism. He ran for president and all that cool stuff.

(Jason at 00:19:04) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:05) And I had him on to sort of help me understand what this transhumanism thing was, and a couple questions came from that. So the first thing that came up was my initial thought of transhumanism was heavily based off of Elon Musk saying we're already cyborgs. It's just the bandwidth problem between us and our phones. And then his whole startup with the Neuralink, and then it was heavily geared towards embedding electronics into your body. But then conversations start coming up with transhumanism.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:34) You know, we got off onto a UBI conversation. So there's a lot of different aspects to it. Do you know where the edges are? Is there a clearly defined thing, or is it just right now it's too new and it's kind of amorphous?

(Jason at 00:19:48) It's all of the above because it's, you know, it's genetics, it's nanotechnology, it's robotics, it's new systems. And this is really about control, you know, at the end of the day. So if you look at, you know, the proponents, like the Zoltans of the world, and then you look at people like Alex Jones, the Infowars folks that see transhumanism as a tool of the global elites to enslave humanity. They're not wrong, both sides, because those are two potential futures that we're trying to either move toward or away from. So, you know, you do kind of have both camps of those that are worried about the overreaches of this kind of technology as it gets into biology, whether it means, you know, you'll have a race of people like Gattaca where you can't get a job if your DNA isn't good enough, if you're not smart enough, and your family was fortunate enough to change your genetics.

(Jason at 00:20:33) And if you don't do that, are you putting your kids at a disadvantage? So you have these really tough decisions to make when you're a parent in the year 2030 or something like that. So we're really—what we're talking about is a fundamental shift in humans, in our evolutionary process. And we're, for the first time, actually dictating some of those things. And we've never been to this point before, so we're augmenting our minds with artificial intelligence.

(Jason at 00:20:56) Like that old TV show Quantum Leap. You know, what's the probability if I do this versus that? And eventually, what you do is you abdicate that responsibility and that judgment to a machine and you begin to trust it more than yourself. Like we've done with Google Maps, you know. You don't memorize where your routes are anymore. You just plug it in and go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:12) Speak for yourself, dude. I MapQuest that thing step by step.

(Jason at 00:21:15) I always have to use the Google Maps, you know. So whatever it is, you don't memorize phone numbers anymore. You know? You touch a name on your phone.

(Jason at 00:21:22) So there's a lot of things we've kind of offloaded from our short-term memory onto machines. It'll be more of that, but it'll be more like what decisions should I make. And I think that's kind of where we get into this aspect of control, and that's where this transhumanism conversation kind of falls off the rails because you get on one side that really believes this is great because we'll remove diseases, we'll live longer, we'll improve lifespan, we can go to Mars because we can extend human life capabilities. On the other side, it can be used as a tool of complete control and dominance at a biological level of humans in a way we've never seen before. So those are both simultaneous realities that we're kind of faced with at this point in time.

(Jason at 00:21:57) And probably the truth is it's going to be a mix of both and pockets of both at different points in time around the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:03) You're right. Because at the end of the day, when we talk about these concepts like government and control, it's just other humans. They're just other humans trying to legislate things. And right now, the way that they can get at us—and I mean "they." I mean, the way humans can get at humans is they can legislate things through laws. Right? They can try to shape your behavior through taxes, deal with your finances, but it's fairly limited. Right? But the moment that we have systems in place that are neural links and 300 million people have these links, who knows what they could—there literally could be things that they could do that are—I sound conspiratorial saying this. I hear it coming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:44) Just like the government could be inside of our head at that point, by definition. Right?

(Jason at 00:22:48) Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's—they don't even need to get inside your head if they can just get inside your wallet because there's a lot of things that can happen at a psychological level if you have—you know, your money is the store of your energy and time for the things you've worked on in the past. So if that is digital money, that's where the concerns go, where you have the central authority that can determine what you do, what you can't do, where you can go, where you can't go, and that's being demonstrated in China. So there's nothing to say that something similar catered to a US audience, you know, couldn't be done here in the United States, and there's a lot of conversation around that.

(Jason at 00:23:17) So we're kind of seeing this on multiple levels, whether it's at an economic level, at a biological level. There are different avenues or attack vectors, and we're seeing that as a human race. That's where we can start seeing these things change.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:31) You seem like a smart guy with this money stuff, so I got a question for you. So money is essentially us exchanging value. When I say I'm going to work, it's basically I'm going to be valuable to other humans, and money is the medium in which we're going to exchange. So when you hear things like the government printing more money, they're essentially devaluing everyone's work and effort in the country. Do I have an understanding of that or am I a crazy person?

(Jason at 00:23:56) No. You're totally right. It's a hidden tax. It debases the currency because it's really based on nothing. And since 1971, the US is off the gold standard. It allowed the US government for really—because of necessity because there was no more gold because countries are coming back and saying we need it. We need our gold back. So we've seen this play out numerous times with numerous countries from Zimbabwe to Venezuela, the Roman Empire. You know, we're just kind of another iteration of that. And history has shown us that over time, every single fiat currency goes to zero.

(Jason at 00:24:26) So the question is, what's a good store holder of value? What's a good medium of exchange? What I've been really looking at are technologies that will stand the test of time, that have that resiliency, that don't have an intermediary that can say you can or can't do something. Something where Joe Biden can't pick up the phone and call Amazon and say shut this guy down. So a lot of my focus lately has been around Bitcoin because it has, you know, that staying power and it's a gravity that all other tokens follow and has the most international adoption, especially for small countries.

(Jason at 00:24:54) So if you look at what happened recently, there was 44 countries that had almost like a Bretton Woods meeting in El Salvador, and these smaller countries can now band together with their own currency and not be reliant on the International Monetary Fund. So the IMF can no longer dictate the contracts and the debts, you know, really extract the value from these poor countries, quote unquote poor—they're resource rich—and I think there's some really interesting things happening for this level of sovereignty. So I think sovereignty is actually the next battleground. Do I have the right to hold my own funds? Do I have the right to transact?

(Jason at 00:25:27) And I think that's really where we talk about personal freedom, and that comes into play.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:31) I want to talk about body modification, part of transhumanism. Yeah.

(Jason at 00:25:35) What this ultimately comes down to is a matter of identity. Right? So how do I identify myself and how do I want others to identify with me? It's going to be very interesting because we are getting into genetics. You know, let's say when you can extend the human lifespan and now a person is entering their prime in their sixties instead of their thirties or forties.

(Jason at 00:25:53) Does age necessarily have the same weight as it did before? So we're actually in this transitionary period. Do you identify with your avatar more than you do your physical self? You know, do we have warehouses of people that are fed tubes and they can live in their digital metaverse and that's their existence? So it's really kind of what we identify with, and it's a personal thing.

(Jason at 00:26:13) So I think in days of the past, you know, you identify with what you do for work as men, women. In the past, it was really around the household and the children. We're finding more and more that people are holding more weight to the digital worlds in which they create, for better or for worse, because that means we're making less babies and populating the world less. But as we continue to get new technology, new capabilities, new augmentation, if you could have a nano suit that would give you some capability—would that make you human? Is it 10 nanobots?

(Jason at 00:26:42) Is it 100 nanobots? Is it 100 million? At what point are you not human? Are you human? So this extends to a lot of different things. Are you human if you're genetically modified? You know, how many cells does it take? So this is really an interesting challenge to think about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:56) Okay. Fast forward 15 years when these elective surgeries come out that can enhance you. When they're talking about setting the age limit for being able to put a Neuralink in yourself.

(Jason at 00:27:08) Oh, my gosh. It's challenging because what happens if you look at the things that happen pre-birth, you know? So, for example, genetic modification, you know, if I want to change my child's eyes, is that okay? But is intelligence not? Is strength not? That child doesn't get any kind of say in what happens in that situation. You do kind of have this aspect. You don't want parents that are, you know, pushing body modification. Go sell my kid's arm off because I want him to be a quarterback, you know, in the robot league.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:32) It's not a bad idea, by the way. Write that one down.

(Jason at 00:27:36) These issues, I think, are tough because they're so far ahead. We can't even predict some of the challenges that we're going to have then because we're still kind of wrestling with the ethical questions we have today. And these are more so cultural challenges we have because the worldview and the time preference and the mindset of someone in a rural community that's in a pretty homogeneous community, they're going to look at the world differently and with different values than someone in a city who's in a melting pot of different cultures and people and things, and they have different ways that they value those things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:05) Yeah, absolutely. So we're saying transhuman is pretty broad, so we're not limiting it to just electronic-based technology.

(Jason at 00:28:15) Yeah. This could be CRISPR. This could be life extension.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:18) Okay.

(Jason at 00:28:18) This could be organ printing. This could be a lot of other things that really it's about extending humanity. If we want to travel to the stars and get out of this solar system, that's really the thing that we have to do. So we need a way to have—we can't put teenagers onto a ship for forty years. You need experienced engineers. So when they land, they can't be 80 years old either.

(Jason at 00:28:40) There's a way to think through some of these things and we have to build on top of the structures that we have, and augmenting humans and technology will definitely be the next step. I don't see a way around it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:50) Yes. And to that point, when will it get to the point where, like, Jurassic Park can resurrect a pterodactyl, we can cut its wings off, build an API, and I can attach them right here? How long until we got that going?

(Jason at 00:29:02) Yeah. We're talking a while, but yeah. I think this goes back to that conversation of, like, what am I if I'm not even a human, if I'm a consciousness, and if I have—let's kind of project, you know, thirty, forty, fifty years and there's nanotechnology and I can create a vessel for my meat suit that I want to have wings. You know, there's things that we can't even imagine that are going to be on the horizon, and this is where we're coming into this cultural, technological, economic battle for different interest groups that see humans as something uniquely different. If you talk about two different religious groups, they'll see humans and life as fundamentally sacred. You look at materialists, they'll say no, we're just a bag of meat and bones and we can do whatever we want with them. There are ethical concerns when it comes to children and reproduction, but the discussions and the decisions we make in this time will have ripple effects forever, and we may be, in fact, one of the last human natural-born generations on this planet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:01) Yeah. I get it. As you're talking, I'm interested in the rise of this technology helping us understand ourselves better. For example, I went on this deep rabbit hole about a decade ago. Somebody had said something along the lines of, well, we don't even understand consciousness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:18) And I was like, what? We don't? And I started researching anesthesiologists and all of the stuff we know about consciousness to find out we know virtually nothing about consciousness. And I think that that's fascinating because as you said, you know, you put the pterodactyl wings on me, and now am I human, or am I a field of consciousness occupying this meat slash pterodactyl suit? Right?

(Jason at 00:30:37) Yeah. Yeah. I think even especially in the last few years, a lot of us have even been coming to wonder what is this reality in this narrative that we've been fed? You know, this materialist world and this is all there is, and we wonder why we have all these mental health issues of people breaking down because there's more to that. We actually live a majority of our life, all of our life in our heads, in this consciousness. And so as we begin to kind of unravel what that is, you know, I think we'll find more and more about ourselves and that seems to be the next frontier is consciousness. And you're starting with the decriminalization of entheogenic plants like psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, DMT, the scientific community is waking up to this as well.

(Jason at 00:31:14) So all of these trends are hitting in really an interesting intersection because from here on out, this is going to have some amazing cascading implications for how we see ourselves, how we see the world, how we see each other, and that we don't necessarily have to view each other as separate. We might all be the same consciousness experiencing ourselves in different points of view.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:33) I always have this recurring thought daydream type deal that I think similar to, you know, we can see different waves of light when we have goggles on, like IR. Right? We can see that. But if I were to go in the eighteen hundreds and tell you that there's this invisible light around us, you'd put me in a mental institution. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:50) But now we have this technology to see it. I believe one day we will have technology in a state where we'll understand how we are all connected. I really believe that. I think we are all connected somehow. I don't know exactly how you would describe it, whether it's a web of connection or whatever it may be, but I do believe—and I know I've heard people like Neil deGrasse Tyson talk these things down about, you know, you haven't thought about someone in fifteen years and then boom, you think about them and then they call you within twenty minutes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:18) Like, there's weird stuff that's like, that he says, oh, that's normal and all this stuff. And I'm just, like, you know, I'm subjectively having this experience. And you look around the world and you see in every single culture, there's some religion that has some formula or set of rules that helps you connect to the spiritual thing better, and everyone argues about the set of rules of how to connect to the spiritual part of yourself and that's religions. Right? So I think one day this technology will actually help us figure out how we are all connected.

(Jason at 00:32:48) Yeah. One of the crazy news stories of the year is that the government acknowledges UFOs and it's not even in the papers or people talking about it really, and that really could fundamentally shift our understanding of the universe. Are these us in the future? Are they human time travelers? Are these interdimensional beings?

(Jason at 00:33:03) Are these aliens from another, you know, planet, solar system? So it's really the mindset of the collective. You know, once the mindset of the collective changes and says, wow, we see the world differently. So that's kind of the moment I think we're all waiting for is humans to wake up and realize that we're all on this together. We're all on this big rock flying around the solar system, and we better learn to get our act together if we want to keep on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:28) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.