The Extropians- The Cult That Birthed All The Silicon Valley Cults

0:00 So, we're going to talk about Extropianism. Extropianism is a late '80s, early '90s collective or group. It actually started as a mailing list. And then there were a bunch of sort of tech cults in the '80s and '90s with names like the Extropians and you know, there were a bunch of these guys. And then more recently there's a lot of this you'll hear these terms like rationalist, post-rationalist, effective altruism, existential risk, long-termism they sometimes say. It comes from Extropianism. So, the Extropianism was the first organized self-identified transhumanist movement. So, we talked before about the history of transhumanism

0:45 conceptually, you know, dating back thousands of years, but even more recently kind of being born out of the '50s and out of like Aldous not I'm sorry Aldous Huxley's brother and all of these different philosophers of the time who sort of coined some of these early terms like transhumanist, like artificial intelligence these these guys back then. But back then these were just concepts. These were just just just ideas. It wasn't until the '80s when the tech boom sort of started where these sort of ideas started actually coming

1:32 together. So, Extropianism was extremely libertarian when it started. It was a radically optimistic libertarian flavored philosophy built in the late 1980s in Southern California around a single coined word extropy. Okay, so Extropians extropy. Extropy is the opposite of entropy. Entropy basically meaning that everything degrades over time. Everything dies, at least all that are living. This is extropy. This is the opposite of that. This is the ability to live on, to live potentially forever, okay? It began as a 50 copy magazine and an email list of a few hundred people,

2:19 okay? So, a mailing list and a 50 copy magazine literally set the course for the crazy world that we are living in right now. Isn't that crazy? So, it dissolved its flagship institution in 2006 with the claim that its mission was essentially complete. That claim was, in a sense, correct. The ideas it incubated, perpetual progress, the defeat of death, intelligence augmentation, mind uploading, anti-stagnation, and techno-libertarian exit are now the working assumptions of a larger part of the tech elite backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI, Google, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and the Saudi

3:04 sovereign wealth fund. Did you get that? That in 2006 after less than 20 years of being a thing, they stopped the ideology because the ideology had infected the tech world and has s- splintered out and fractured out into what we now know or what we're calling TESCREAL. This is sort of the the nexus point, the the origin of where that comes from. So, the through lines run through three descendant movements that all trace common ancestry to the Extropians mailing list, modern academic transhumanism, and long-termism,

3:50 cryptocurrency. That's right, because the Extropians were actually in bed with the alleged group that created Bitcoin. Created Bitcoin. For today, it's clear as public vehicles are effective altruism, Marc Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto, the billionaire longevity boom, and the framing of the AGI race itself. So, thinking back on that video that we just watched of Jaron Lanier, where he's talking about it just being software. When you really break it down, it's just software. It's not really a ghost in the machine. It's software that we may not understand, and it may do things that we would like

4:35 we've always done with things we don't understand, we've framed them in a way that is kind of esoteric, but maybe rooted in something that we may be able to closely approximate what it is. But, the AGI race, well, that may be manufactured. I'm not saying it is manufactured. I'm saying it may be. Later in our society, just dating tracing back to these ideologies. Isn't that interesting? So, Extropy was coined in January of '88 by T. W. Bell, writing as T. O. Morrow, tomorrow, and defined by Max Moore. That is a name that you need to remember because we are going to talk quite a bit about Max Moore today.

5:20 My more recent livestreams, you'd know the term TESCREAL at this point. Extropianism is E, not the EA, that's effective altruism, the E. Optimism as an engineering project. The first organized transhumanist movement, a libertarian super-optimistic crusade to reverse entropy through reason, technology, and the conquest of death. The second letter of TESCREAL and the social network where the whole bundle was incubated. Extropian took the loose philosophy of transhumanism, which had previously had existed for about 30 years at the time, right, and turned it into a community. Founded by Max More in the late '80s, it preached perpetual progress, radical life extension,

6:06 cryonics. Remember when we talked about that in the transhumanism companies stream that I did last week? Um Max More actually owns the cryonics lab that like Peter Thiel and all these dudes are going to have their bodies frozen. Uh yeah. Um so cryonics and near-religious faith that intelligence could fight back the universe's slide into disorder. Its mailing list and conferences gathered a roster of future power players. Uh Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, Julian Assange. Yeah, Julian Assange. Uh he was part of the Extropians. Um you know, because he was a hacker in the '80s. I forget his hacker name, uh but he was like a prolific hacker in the '80s and uh was definitely part of this

6:53 group. People don't realize that. Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and even Jeffy Eppy. Our boy Jeffrey Epstein. That's right. Critics argue this was the incubator where academic transhumanism fused with Silicon Valley libertarianism and seeded nearly every movement that followed. A libertarian actually has uh two distinct uh sub-ideologies within them, but I would argue that there is a third, and that is like these this tech libertarianism. And that's why you see that all these guys who gave all this money to Donald Trump also gave money to Biden, not like funding their side. They're funding whatever's going to get them and their

7:40 tech dreams ahead, because none of this works without like government funding, deep deep deep deep pockets. The war on entropy, the name is the whole thesis. Extropy was coined as the conceptual opposite of entropy like we said before, the physical law that everything tends towards disorder, dis- decay, and death. Extropians proposed the intelligence and technology could push the other way, towards more order, more energy, more life, more capacity without limits. Entropy was not destiny but an enemy to be defeated. If I'm going to be honest with you, doesn't sound half bad. Like these guys actually

8:25 had a pretty good like, you know, albeit a an idyllic version of like what they saw the world becoming, but they saw that things were coming, you know? And and to be perfectly honest with you, if I didn't come into all of this through transhumanism, particularly modern transhumanism, which is really eugenics 2.0, you know, which is batshit crazy, and if I came in on entropy or or extropy, extropianism, I I'd maybe I'd maybe get on board with this. Because it's actually not that bad. They reframed optimism as a duty rather than a mood where transhumanism made the abstract claim that humans should be improved, extropianism supplied the

9:10 attitude. A self-described super optimism that treated aging, stupidity, scarcity, and death as solvable problems and treated despair as a kind of cowardice. It was transhumanism with a flag, a creed, and a clubhouse. In fact, it was and I've I've kind of called the extropians more like the outreach for transhumanism. And that is in a lot of ways what it was. It was the It was It was that. It was the outreach. They were doing like email and stuff in the early '90s. They were doing magazines or like zines, really. Which, if you're old like me, you know what those are. Extropianism

9:57 matters less for its doctrines than for its guest list. So, the Extropians mailing list in the '90s gathered AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, futurist Ray Kurzweil, that's the guy who, you know, coined the term the singularity, a young Julian Assange, philosopher Nick Bostrom, economist Robin Hanson, and teenage Eliezer Yudkowsky, who wrote, um, "If Anybody Builds It, Everybody Dies," and the financier Jeffrey Epstein. It was, critics argue, the social network where academic transhumanism fused with Silicon Valley libertarianism. Yes, Jeffrey Epstein. Like, people think of Jeffrey Epstein from like early 2000s to now, but dog was in the game, bro.

10:44 Dog was in the game. He was in the academic game as far back as, what, late '70s, early '80s? So, yeah, this is, you know, if you make content and you're only talking to 300 people and you think that you don't have any influence, this had 300 people on a mailing list and changed the world forever. Not saying for the good, but, you know, the influence was there. So, from this milieu, the rest of LessWrong grew. Yudkowsky carries its memes into singularitarianism and rationalism, Bostrom into long-termism, Hanson into the rationalist blogosphere,

11:30 Emilie P. Torres and Timnit Gebru argue extropianism was the institutional bridge that carries the whole ideology and they contend it's eugenic assumptions. So what I did last night was there were I think like 20 issues or something of the the extropian magazine. I mean these things they're they're a little dense. You know, they're talking about like nanotechnology and transhumanism and cryonics and all of these different like at the time like future technologies. They're talking about VR. They're talking about AI. And so like these guys were just like real like high science minded type people who drew in

12:18 like-minded people. Really cool. Um so again like I I urge you all to go to the AI cult. I'm not going to read this whole page to you. So we got some of these people here though. Max More who we're going to talk about, born Max O'Connor, changed his name to signal perpetual self-improvement. F- you know, more. Just always more. Founded the Extropy Institute and wrote the principles of extropy. Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, Julian Assange, of course Jeffrey Epstein. And if I ever just kind of gloss over the Jeffrey Epstein stuff, it's kind of a little bit on purpose because I want to do a like a a real YouTube video about Jeffrey Epstein's ties to

13:04 transhumanism and these cults. Um but I still have a little bit more research to do because uh believe it or not it's actually pretty difficult to get a lot of stuff um from the '90s with regards to Jeffrey Epstein. Not and of course I have web and I have all of the documents in there and And are some stuff in there, but I'm going to have to do a lot more research that's outside of the Epstein files. And so, I'm not quite ready yet. But, I also don't want to I want to leave I want to leave some meat on that bone for a YouTube video later on. Of course, old Jeffy Eppy, he's always involved. guy is everywhere, dude. everywhere. And you can also go in and look at all of these

13:52 different these different papers and things of that nature. Those Those will be in there. And I will probably add every issue the Extropian Extropy magazine later on. Because I will keep going. And KJ, glad that you are learning stuff off of the the site. That's what it's there for, right? It's just It's It's just there to be like a one-stop shop. You aren't You aren't going to be like, you know, the most proficient person ever, but you're going to have a deeper understanding than like 99% of people out there about this. And if you have been here before, you know, I think that this is one of the more important things that people should be paying attention to. I said we were

14:37 going to talk a little bit about Max More. Max More is a pretty central person, very deep into the cryonics side of things. He's transhumanist not in the sense of like what what we've been seeing more of the transhumanism stuff that I've been showing you, which is like the way more modern stuff that's like more like AI sort of coded and and things of that nature. And instead, yes, Pitzi, freezing people. Yes, so he's like like like Walt Disney freezing your head and your body and whatever. Yes, that's that is that is his whole bag for sure. But,

15:22 again, we're not going to watch this whole thing, but kind of wanted to show you the beginning of this because there may be some people here that you recognize. Max More, will superintelligence come with super wisdom? This video was put out in 2012, but I think it even predates that, probably between 2008 and 2012. Before you see him, does anybody recognize that voice? I'm going to bring it back. I'm going to bring it back because I want I want to see if anybody recognize that voice. Next speaker is uh Dr. Max More, the Extropy Institute. Anybody? It's old Dr. Anti-Christ himself. So, let's check out Max More and look at Peter Thiel, dude. Look at that guy. That's a soft

16:07 right there. uh more like the Jetsons and not like uh these various dystopian alternatives. And uh he's writing a book entitled The Proactive Principle. And with that uh uh Dr. More, you have 5 minutes. Thanks. Peter Thiel, yo. Thank you. Uh since the speaker's on a limited time, I'm going to start speaking at a normal rate, and then I'll increase super exponentially until I'm going at a very high rate. Yeah, he's he's Peter Thiel is J.D. Vance's um creator, for sure. J.D. Vance awfully quiet as a vice president, honestly. Like, a little too quiet quiet, if you ask me. Fortunately, we have a device hidden in the audience which will increase your perceptual speed at the same time.

16:56 Um the main focus of my talk it's hard to pick a little focus, but I decided that's what I want to talk about was uh the fact that we may achieve superintelligence in the form of cognitive intelligence does not necessarily mean that we will achieve wisdom or super wisdom. I think everybody here is familiar with the phenomenon where somebody highly intelligent, perhaps even yourself, has made some stupid choices. Short-sighted choices, overcome by certain desires or lusts or hungers. Just really not listening to your intelligence, not letting it actually take you in the right direction. So, I think that's a real problem because why should we assume that we should we should not assume that machine intelligence will be necessarily exempt from that. It'll be different, no doubt. It'll have different origins, maybe different kinds of problems, but oops, so I'm going too fast with myself

17:41 now. Okay. Look at that computer. So, machines will probably have these problems, too. So, apart from the traditional question, when will machines exceed human intelligence, meaning intelligence in the extended cognitive sense, a more important question, or at least as important a question is when will they exceed or at least match human wisdom. We could do a little bit better than us. And I think to avoid Never. When it comes to wisdom. Intelligence, we're pretty close. At least for most uh most people. We're pretty close. We're right there. But intelligence, uh sorry, wisdom. Um the collective of your experiences and uh and the things that you cannot learn in a book, wisdom, clankers can't experience. So, wisdom never

18:27 comes with it. That's my theory. I mean, a set of qualities including mindfulness, which again, you could be highly intelligent but not very mindful. You may not be really be paying attention to what your reason is telling you, what data there are out there, and in fact I mean, everything he's saying is that intelligence isn't everything. Intelligence is not everything. And if you've ever known somebody who is insanely smart but super autistic, then you know what that means. Like, it's not everything. Uh it also means creativity because you can be very sophisticated analytical uh analysis without necessarily being creative. Um and also, if you want to see all the options to make a wise choice, I think you have to also have uh be able to generate lots of alternatives. Objectivity.

19:12 Or it's like the famous thing where it's like um um you know Einstein, as brilliant as he was, could like barely tie his own shoes, right? Same thing. AWC, you're super autistic. I'm super ADD, neurospicy as So, I'm with you. We're we're in uh we're in good company. something which we can never really completely reach, but uh we can approximate using principles. Um And of course cognitive capability is your ability to use your intelligence to to actually solve those problems. And then what I'm calling astrophic foundation, I really just mean um good intention, if you like, to put it very simply. And then various kinds of social, environmental, institutional support. Even if you're very smart and wise yourself, it may be difficult to make the wise decision if everybody around you is pushing you in one direction, feeding you certain kinds of information, uh rewarding you for certain kinds of behavior. Certainly an

19:58 issue you deal with in large corporations. Anyway, just kind of give you a little bit of an idea of who this guy is, because what he did was he started Alcor. The world's leader in cryonics, okay? Established in 1972. So, he actually I don't think he started it, but he he is the uh the owner and operator of Alcor. And this is a big uh transhumanist cryonics, like you die and they put you into like a Actually, you know what? Let me let me pull up this up because I was watching this last night actually. Um Max Moore on Theo Von, of all things, 3

20:43 years ago. Uh it was actually like a really good video. If you were going to be at Alcor, you're on your death bed, right? Their team is there. And this is what they do immediately. And this is at Alcor, which is this place. equation that tells you that if you drop 10°C in temperature, your metabolism will slow down by 50%. So, if you can get down three lots of 10° you slow down to a half a quarter and eighth of the speed which means you got eight times as much time to transport the patients. Wow, so they so they That's why they cool organs when they're transporting them, too. So you want to get them cold quick. Yeah. So here they've arrived at the Alcor facility the surgeon has been called in and I'm assuming this is a whole body patient they're going to open up the chest in what's called a median

21:28 sternotomy basically just cut open the chest. Okay. Uh they're going to access the main major blood vessels of the heart. So this is still working on the surgery part. So this is all taking place above freezing is important to understand we haven't gone below freezing at this point. So here they're connecting up these tubes are basically connecting up the patient's vascular system the blood vessels to a pump and chiller system. Um what we're going to do over the next several hours under computer control is to pump out as much of the blood and intracellular fluid as we can and then you can see basically the perfusion machine that's doing the pumping. It's going to take as much blood and another fluids as possible and replace it with a kind of a medical grade antifreeze. Okay. And do you save the blood and stuff that you pull out? No we don't need to save that. Like that's something that's easily replaceable we do that all the time even today. Um so we're replacing with a

22:13 medical that's me talking about it. So the medical grade antifreeze or cryoprotectant as we call it. Um we actually use the same cryoprotectant that's being used in research right now for human organ cryopreservation. You know we talked about how people try to donate their organs and you have to get them from here to to what whatever state the person's in hopefully in time and there's a lot of them don't make it in time and so we lose tens of thousands of people every year because they can't get the organs in time. So the goal is and this is very relevant to what we're doing and there's a lab right here actually in California that does this uh not too far away. Um the goal is to take organs and cryopreserve them just like we do hold them down at extremely cold temperatures you can keep them for you know for months or years if necessary keep them in a hospital bank and then rewarm them and then as the

22:58 patient needs them they're right there you don't have to worry about transporting them. You could save many of thousands of lives a year. Think about it though, Alcor Labs opened in 1972. This interview was 3 years ago, so 2023. That is quite a long time. And they're not really there yet with the science of it. Is what it sounds like. Um maybe they are now. But a lot of people like Peter Thiel and uh Sam Altman and you know, a lot of these just familiar faces, they are customers or going to be customers of Alcor. And so yeah, um it's pretty pretty pretty wild. Pretty wild stuff. So this is X P magazine summer

23:45 1990 issue six. And uh so you can see some of these um so what they're writing about in here. The thermodynamics of death, neurocomputing part three. Um they do a lot of like a nano tech stuff. Uh you know, there's there's forums and and letters to the editor and and book recommendations and just like for nerds. The transhumanist taste. Um life in utopia will be the birthright of all self-interested rational beings. You know, it's like to be honest a lot of this stuff is is really not that crazy. When like these are just like really smart people that are just

24:30 like kind of thinking about theoretical futures. It wasn't so serious. It wasn't like a business of this at the time. These guys weren't like the richest was um influential people in the world. These were just people who were talking about theoretical science and how this theoretical science could change humanity. And as a thought experiment, what what there's nothing wrong with that in in my personal opinion. Now, sure there is some There's some stuff going on here when it comes to ideology and things of that nature, but like again, it's still really early. This is, you know, I I was not really going to do

25:16 entropy extropy because I thought like maybe you guys wouldn't really be that interested because it's not as salacious, honestly. But, I think we should understand this to understand everything else that comes after. And so, all of the other stuff that we're talking about that we've talked about and that we will talk about, this at least gives some sort of a a frame of reference as to like where this all kind of comes from. The extropian principles and these changed many times over the years. Not completely. I would say like things got amended or edited, maybe some additions. But, boundless expansion, self-transformation. You know, it kind of almost reads like a Jordan Peterson book. You know, dynamic

26:03 optimism, intelligent technology. And then we go kind of deeper into this. And then, you know, over the years more probably gets up to like 10, right? This is in an early issue. But, this is what they what he's talking about. Boundless expansion, seeking more intelligent wisdom and personal power, an unlimited lifespan and removal of natural, social, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. No limits on our personal and social progress and possibilities. Again, remember, highly libertarian, techno-libertarian in nature. Self-transformation, both moral and cognitive. Critical examination of all assumptions and

26:48 models. Taking charge of one's own life, biological and neurological augmentation, social conditions for self-transformation including spontaneous order, rejection of central control, and maximum sustainable freedom. Like these dudes were super idealistic at the time. Fostering of diversity and exploration of possibilities. AWC asks, "So, Kevin, how close are we to Terminator robots cuz that's what I'm worried about?" I think we're not close at all. There's only been a couple of commercial robot projects out there. None of them have shipped. All of them have basically been found to be like dudes in Pakistan running them. Robotics

27:36 is there, especially when you look at Boston Dynamics. AI is there, or like how well are they being merged together? From From what I've seen, I don't think it's there yet. But you never know. It could It could turn on quickly, but those things are very expensive. And for it to work, for there to be enough to be a problem, it will have to be at like a retail level. So, there will have to be like enough of them to bring the the drive the cost down. I just don't know if the economics of it really work out when it comes down to like AI-driven autonomous robots. I don't know if at scale the economics of its of it

28:23 works yet. And so, theoretically, yes, all the components are there. But monetarily, economically, we're not there, at least not at scale. And so, to me, we're not in like an I, Robot, Terminator type situation yet, but we'll see. So, there's dynamic optimism, promotion of a positive empowering attitude towards our individual future and that of all intelligent beings. Intelligent technology, affirmation of the role of science and its offspring, technology, guided by extropian values in realizing the optimistic dynamic value perspective of extropianism.

29:10 Extropians, they were super libertarian. They were about sovereignty. They were about using technology to better ourselves. And then, when you pull on that thread, well, then it goes into, you know, how do you define what being alive is or being dead, right? And then you start getting into all the philosophical. And then it's like, well, how do we use science to answer those questions. That's what they were kind of doing. Where it gets to that, I'm like I'm actually like not against this. You know, if I were a super smart person in 1988 and not 4 years old, well, maybe I could

29:57 have fallen into this. Because like I like sovereignty and I like technology, back then I maybe would have wanted to live forever. Kevin, do you want to be frozen? I don't want to sound morbid. Uh no, I don't. I'm on board for the human experience. I think that though I am I am not a follower of God, I do think that this is the design. But, anyway, extropianism. Extropianism has, let me back it up, so many things that shape our society today traces its roots back to extropianism. Now, it could just be people who were interested

30:42 in them uh on the mailing list getting the magazines maybe talking to some of the people that were featured in the magazines but the very bright and the very smart of us in the world at that time that was the place the Extropy Institute that's where so much of these fringe scientific ideas were really taking hold okay some of this stuff like transhumanism had dated back decades but it was through the Extropy Institute that these things came to the forefront for those who who sought it for those

31:27 who were interested in that and that just happened to be a lot of these like early hackers early coders early tech people and this is at the time that Silicon Valley is forming now there may be an argument for this also being something that has ties to intelligence I don't have any evidence of that yet which is why I'm not really talking about that but it is worth at least mentioning that that is for sure something to consider and hopefully as more and more information comes out there we can we can learn we can learn more and we

32:13 can see how much of our intelligence actually is at play with all of these different ideologies cults things of that nature what we do know is that all of these companies like run by the Elon Musks and the Sam Altmans and the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Jeff Bezos's of the all started with government contracts. Largely, at least with our social media, they were, you know, private offshoots of failed government programs that were there to control us. And so, of course, our intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, um have

33:00 involvement, for sure. And maybe extropianism had organically branched out into all of these ideologies. Maybe some of these offshoot ideologies were nudged a little bit, um and uh and fed uh to become some other things. And maybe there's a battle for which one wins. But who knows?