Is technology a religion? with Greg Epstein

Secure Talk - Greg Epstein

Justin Beals: Hello everyone, and welcome to Secure Talk. This is your host, Justin Beals. We have an exceptional guest for us today. His name is Greg Epstein. But before we get into Greg's background, I wanted to talk a little bit about the conversation that we get to have today with Greg. I've worked in technology for almost my entire adult life, and prior to even, being a professional in the technology space, I worked as a hobbyist, enjoying learning about computers and programming, sensing power in the networks that we developed, and the opportunity to connect with people all over the world. 

My earliest job was for British Telecom, and we were developing the backbone of the Internet in many ways. And finding an opportunity to connect with a network engineer in Tokyo or a field engineer in Germany was a really special part of what I think was emerging in our world. I've long built software and delivered it to people in critical situations. Most notably in education, and especially in education, I've struggled sometimes with the ethics of what we do.

I feel like the software that I've built has greatly expanded access to content and materials and learning opportunity that people could take on their own. At the same time, I've seen public school systems gutted. And really lost the momentum of the community around them. I've seen software delivered for the use of many to steal the attention of populations, to discourage them or to dissuade them  from being active in their civics.

And these very dangerous activities and the use of these technologies to hurt and harm our communities at large and individuals. Is really frustrating for me personally. I've long looked to try and find a path for effect, effective ethics in what we do and try to make better decisions about the types of products that I build and the types of people that I build them for and the constituencies that they're focused on.

I recently had a chance to read Greg's book, “Tech Agnostic. How Technology Became The World's Most Powerful Religion and Why it Desperately Needs a Reformation”, and was floored by the need for us to have a mechanism for interpreting these challenges and decisions we're making. I think this is an amazing conversation with Greg, and at this point, I'm happy to introduce his background because what we will discuss are some of these things that have concerned me for a long time. 

Greg Epstein serves as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and also serves the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as their humanist chaplain. 

For nearly two decades, he has built a unique career as one of the world's most prominent humanist chaplains. Professionally trained members of the clergy who support the ethical and communal lives of non-religious people. More recently, Greg's 2018 move to join MIT, in addition to his work at Harvard, inspired an 18-month residency at the leading Silicon Valley publication TechCrunch, in which he published nearly 40 in-depth pieces exploring the ethics of technologies and companies that are shifting our definition of what it means to be human, often in troubling ways.

His book, “Tech Agnostic, How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation”, was published for MIT Press. In 2005, Greg received ordination as a Humanist Rabbi from the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Religion and Chinese, and a Master of Arts in Judaic Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Master's of Theological Studies from the Divinity, Harvard Divinity School.

He completed a year-long graduate fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I hope, like me, you'll enjoy this conversation with Greg as we attempt to navigate the path better, with better outcomes, better precision, and more faith in the future. 

Thanks, everybody, for joining us.

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Justin Beals: Welcome everyone back to Secure Talk. We're really ecstatic to have you joining us today. And our guest Greg, of course, Greg, thanks for joining us on Secure Talk today.

Greg Epstein:  Thank you, Justin. It's a pleasure to be with you. 

Justin Beals: Of course, Greg, we're going to talk a fair bit about a brilliant book. I was really privileged to be able to read it.

Of course it, will be coming out, I think, near the end of October, and we'll have some information in the show notes about how to buy the book or get access to it. But the name of the book is “Tech Agnostic, How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and Why It desperately Needs a Reformation”.

Greg, you know, we've had a chance to introduce your background to our listeners, deep expertise, obviously. And I wanted to, First off, connect your work a little bit with a concept that we deal with a lot in this podcast, which is security. And  I'm just curious in your large background, around technology and the social sciences, religion specifically, how do you think about the crossroads of ethics and technology and the concept of security?

Greg Epstein: Yeah, thank you, Justin. It was a really interesting question that I started to ponder when I got your invitation, and I was excited to be on this podcast and talk to your listeners in particular. Now, first, let me get out of the way that obviously, when we're talking about cyber security,  you know, when we're talking about secure online transactions, we're talking about the prevention of, you know, of hacking and of, you know, foreign powers interfering with America's internet infrastructure, etcetera.

I mean, all these things, these are things that I think about when I think about security, but I really don't have any expertise in them. However, what occurred to me that I think a lot about with security in my role as a chaplain, in the work that I do as a humanist, That I think really could be real relevant to the tech community and to people who think about security professionally is this, who is more secure?

The person who has his or her home all set up with, I don't know whether it be simply safe or some other, you know, security program, platform, etcetera. They've got cameras monitoring themselves and their environment 24/7. They, you know, they have a quick connection to the police or other authorities, you know, who've been sort of militarized to take care of any threats that might occur, etcetera Right?

That kind of person, is secure in a certain kind of way, but who is more secure: that person? or the person who doesn't have any of that but is living in a more just, more equitable society such that the neighbors surrounding that person are more likely to feel,  like their basic needs are met, like they, you know, they're not worried about being able to live a life of dignity, take care of their children, take care of themselves and their loved ones, where they, they have a sense of deep community where they've got good friendships, they've got good relationships, there's an overall feeling of peacefulness and of culture and of vitality in the world that they live in.

I would suggest that the second person is ultimately more secure. Because there's less of a chance that they're going to need the big security apparatus, the big security infrastructure. We don't pay, in my judgment, nearly enough attention to creating the second kind of security. 

And I wish we would. I wish we did. And even, you know, even for people that do the kind of legitimately really important work that you know that you do and that others in the space do. I mean, I'm not saying that you know, we all need to become sort of Internet pacifists. But you know, I am saying that the world does seem to me that it would be better if we paid more attention to the more humanistic definition of security.

Justin Beals: I mean, there's a pragmatism to that, right? Because we see, especially, concepts like fraud perpetrated a lot when there is a tension between something someone has and something someone wants. And if we can share more holistically in the benefits of our technology and the norms on how to operate it, you know, in an empathetic way, in a way that treats people humanely, you know, in a way that treats our community as a type of community we want to live in, then we just create more security by default broadly.

Greg Epstein: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I read when I was first getting started working on this book, you know, trying to become more than just a chaplain, a humanist, you know, trying to become, you know, somebody who works in the tech space, is, I was reading, Douglas Rushkoff, the tech critic, media critic, etcetera.

And, you know, the idea was he was called in by these people who offered him, you know, more than a year's salary to fly down to, I think it was Texas, you know, to speak at this big conference. And, and he was, you know, unclear why he was going there. And he gets there, and he's ready to speak for big audience. 

And instead, there's just a few guys in the room, billionaires, and they ask him one question. And the question is:  after the event, right after the apocalyptic event, how will we keep our security forces loyal to us?  And the answer is there's no answer. There's no way to do it, right? Like if we're all going to be living in an apocalyptic future where, you know, we're, we're all in, in literal or metaphorical bunkers, is there really any way to ensure that the security forces don't just, you know, seize our assets?

I don't know that there is. 

Justin Beals: I mean, certainly, humanity has done that to itself again and again and again and again. We have a repeatable pattern, right? Yeah. 

Greg Epstein: Yeah. 

Justin Beals: We're, we're in that 

Greg Epstein: situation already. Metaphorically. I hope we don't get there. Literally. 

Justin Beals: Right. Absolutely. Well, and you bring up some words that I think correspond with the subject matter in your book and apocalypse, things like a prophecy, and  I'll revisit the title here:” How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and why it Desperately Needs a Reformation” I, of course, when we mention religion, think about my own very, Christian, North American upbringing, but I'm sure there are other analogies, to a religion or characteristics that we would look for.

Could you help us illuminate those habits or activities that you think we're finding corollary in tech as a religion? 

Greg Epstein: Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, the, the basic idea for those who aren't familiar is, you know, I'm a chaplain. I've been a chaplain for, you know, a little over 20 years now. But I'm a chaplain for the non-religious, and you know, I study religion and write about it as well.

And, you know, after about 14, 15 years of that kind of work, I was invited to join MIT. as a chaplain alongside the longstanding work at Harvard that I've been doing. And I'd been sort of, you know, I'd been sort of floated or suggested that I might do something along those lines a few years earlier.

But, you know, it hadn't really made any sense to me. You know, I was already at one big university. Why, work at another one as well? But I'd been thinking about the sort of nature of community a lot. I'd been,  working on a sort of an experimental congregation for the non-religious, which is the sort of, the fastest-growing, religious demographic in this country.

And, you know, was finding just this, this huge group of people that might want some kind of alternative community. But when I got that invitation to MIT, I realized like, Oh, wait a second. We've been trying to build a, let's call it, a secular community,  to connect the world, to bring the world closer together.

Except that's language that I just cribbed from Mark Zuckerberg. And Facebook or Metta, right? They had already done it. And it's not to say that they had done it. particularly well, certainly not perfectly, certainly not in a way that I wanted to emulate, but nonetheless, they had done it. They did connect the world in a certain way and really redefine the ways in which humans are doing that in the 21st century.

And  I started to think about T in MIT that the influence that technology and the tech is having on our modern lives. And I started to think about it, you know, through the lens of what I know. I'm gonna grant you like if all you have is a is a hammer than everything you see is a nail. I get it. But it just started to occur to me That if you really want to understand the role that tech is playing in our lives today, because it's not just an industry, right?

We say the tech industry, but there's no such thing because, you know, there's no industry in the world anymore that's not really a tech industry. Right? So just, you know, what is tech in our lives today? And it occurred to me, oh, If you really want to understand it, look to religion. It looks sociologically when you sort of open your eyes to it, a lot like a religion.

And I wasn't the first person to point that out. But when I started to think about it, I realized, oh, wait a second. If it is a religion, like a number of really interesting writers, critics, and thinkers had pointed out for over a generation, it's now become the world's largest religion. And that really got me thinking and sort of the rest is history through the book.

Justin Beals: Yeah. I have certainly, complained about a lot of aspects in tech that I think mirror the sociological complaints that you see in religion. In some ways, I've been afraid to correlate them because, um, maybe because I operate in it. And I started out my life in a, in a religion and felt like I needed to break that worldview, and, and find something new.

I mean,I feel like a lot of us are on a path. There's searching, there's questions we have, things that we would like to answer. The thing, some of the things that have, I've really struggled with the tech space is like the cultishness of founders that we follow sometimes. And but I want to highlight I'm a founder.

You know, I feel like a part of the problem here, Greg. 

Greg Epstein:  Well, you know, the nice thing though, Justin, is that  a real solid cult leader does not, you know, stay up late metaphorically or literally worrying about, you know, whether they're a cult leader or at least they don't admit that they do. So, you know, put it this way.

I'm not, you know, I'm not following you around to know how cultish your following is, but I will just say that the fact that you're willing to grapple with that is already encouraging. There's a lot of cultishness in the tech world where, let's just say it's not exactly self-reflective. 

Justin Beals: You know, you talk about this a little bit in the book, but I thought it'd be an important thing to highlight because I think it would be a part of, you know, An initial readers that's working in technology perhaps early criticism and reading would be that, you know, technology or the concept of invention has been a part of humanity for a long time.

 I think there could be a thesis that it preceded the construction of religion, even if we look, you know, at humanity's progression through an emergence lens as opposed to a divine lens.

Why do you think we've decided to turn tech into a religion because it didn't have to be maybe right like we've invented things before religion and after 

Greg Epstein: Yeah. I mean, it's a great question and I will clarify, of course, that, what I'm calling the religion that really needs examination is this four-letter word called tech.

There's a real difference between that, that I'll describe in a second, and technology as a whole, which, yeah, I mean, you could, you know, we weren't there. We don't know for sure. You know what comes first, the religious impulse or the technological impulse? you know, on humanity's metaphorical first day, I have a feeling, you know, by sundown, somebody was already thinking of both.

So, you know, they're they're real foundational phenomena to humanity. But yeah, you know, technology, you know, as a whole is something. First of all, my book is not critical of technology as a whole. You know, I'm not that kind of person where, you know, I just really have a hunger to, you know, go back to the days of sailing across the Atlantic on wooden boats.

You know, I'm not the kind of person that like, you know, after I get off this, this call with you, I'm going to, you know, tell you take my computer and throw it into the sea at,  in frustration or whatever. No. You know, but there's this thing called tech, which, as a phrase, you know, it existed a hundred-plus years ago.

I even have the Google chart that shows, you know, the usage of that phrase in the English language over the years. And you know it, people were calling Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech, for quite some time, but around the late eighties early nineties, the usage of the word in the English language skyrockets.

And that is the launch of a kind of new sect in humanity's history with technology, a sect that you know, a lot of things are like religion. Justin, you know, I talk about this. I asked people to compare, you know, things in their daily lives to religion, and you can just do so many, you know like people were, you know, we're giving the examples like, Nike sneakers, the University of Texas football team, Bardala tree, the worship of William Shakespeare, right?

You know, like there's a little bit of religious spirit to a lot of the things that humans preoccupy themselves with. The thing is, those would be minor cults. But what if you have something secular that starts acting a lot like a religion that has a kind of cultishness to it, that has a kind of theology to it, a kind of doctrine to it, that has rituals that has hierarchies and that, unlike a lot of religions I could mention, might actually cause an apocalypse, right? 

And what if you have that, and it really becomes not only a powerful religion but the dominant ethos on the face of the earth?, which I  really do think the tech has, then you're dealing with a whole different animal altogether. 

Justin Beals: I mean, you think about the size of the industry, the number of people that are working in it, the some of the fundamental philosophies and phrases that we can exchange with each other and learn quite quickly where that individual might be in, you know, virtuous signaling, it would be an appropriate term here when. Two systems administrators are talking about the types of operating systems that they load in and which ones they philosophically believe in, like a Microsoft versus an open source license. Linux and are they 

Greg Epstein: Agnostic about that? Right? Yeah, right. 

Justin Beals: And rarely are we. We have dogs in the hunt. You know, we have things that we want to win. Usually, the things we're experts in or are right. Our expertise depends on being viable to make a living. 

Greg Epstein: And by the way, you're talking, Justin, about, the tech leader, right?

The person who's immersed,, whose livelihood depends on that world. In my metaphor, that would be the clergyperson that would be the church leader. So you're not even taking into account, with that description that you just gave of all the followers. You know, you have to understand, you know, you, the tech leader that might be listening to this, you have to understand, it's not just you and your closest friends. You've actually started something so big tha the vast majority of humans on earth are deeply, deeply impacted by what you and your colleagues are doing. 

You know, it's like most faith leaders that I know, are worried about trying to organize their flock that, you know, I started talking about herding cats back in the day when I wrote my book “Good Without God”, about how it can be sort of challenging to organize nonreligious people.

And then I realized, like all these other chaplains, I work with 30, 50 other chaplains at MIT and Harvard, respectively,  Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, etcetera. And they all talk about herding cats. It's hard for all of them to organize because it's not easy to get people together into a community.

You gotta recognize the tech world has succeeded beyond the wildest imagination of most religious cults in getting people to adopt its practices, to follow its belief system, to do what it wants them to do.

Justin Beals: I, this hits home for me in projects that I've been involved in. And I'll quote something from your book, like traditional religions once did technology is shaping our thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, relationships and future. 

I,  in a prior part of my career, I built a lot of education technology where we would deliver learning curriculums online.  I was passionate about it because I thought we were improving access for people to learn and grow. I thought we were creating a net benefit, but very easily found that much of the movement in online learning was about scaling the ledger, the balance sheet on some of these institutions, and I saw very bad behavior, especially in K-12,  where the, you know, the leader of the organization was not necessarily a software engineer, but passionate about the fact that technology was going to allow them to capture a state full of K-12 students.

But we knew that we were impacting them negatively.  They weren't showing up to school, and they weren't learning the same way. And so, for me, this is where we see that apocalypse, right? Happening in real time because I know those students got a lesser education. I'm constantly haunted by my involvement in it, to be honest with you.

Greg Epstein: Yeah. I mean, that's, it's deeply powerful to hear you reflect on that. Right? One of the things that I really, about my work in religious spaces, because again, I'm not saying that anything that is a little bit religious or even a lot religious needs to be eliminated from the face of the earth.

And I think for some people, that's, that's a clarification that's really needed because we think about religion and non-religion as you know, in sort of constant conflict with one another. You know, a sort of death conflict, but I'm the kind of humanist or atheist where I have dedicated my life to working alongside religious people and religious communities, to try to make a better world for all, not to try to eliminate their belief any more than I would want them to try to eliminate mine.

And so, you know, what I'm getting at is what I love about religious people that I, that I, I do love are their abilities, their interest in, self-criticism, right?  So, I love Christians who know how to criticize Christianity. I love religious Jews who know how to criticize religious Judaism, Buddhists who know that unlike, you know, unlike some of the marketing that their tradition gets in the West today, Buddhism itself is not perfect either.

And so, you know, what I'm hearing here, it's like, I'm not suggesting that that, you know, tech leaders need to be so perfect that they never make mistakes or we never try anything unless we know with 100 per cent certainty that it's going to work, but more circumspection, more humility, more willingness to criticize our own ideas and learn something, sacrifice something because of our own failures. That would be nice. And that's what I hear in, in what you're, what you're talking about,

Justin Beals: Especially speaking of failure. I wondered Greg, if you might describe a story in your book about two individuals, Chad and Javon,  Especially, around this gospel of winning, which I see really a part deeply a part of the tech industry T-E-C-H, yeah. 

Greg Epstein: Well, thank you. Yeah. I mean, it's, this is early on. When we're recording this early on in the process of, you know, getting the book out there. And it's actually the first time that I've been asked to tell this story. So it's, it's kind of moving for me.  I'll say, first of all, something theological.

And then I'll tell you a little bit  about these two sort of characters in my book. So, Chad and Javon are two sort of characters; Javon is the kind of the main character in the first chapter after the introduction of the book. The chapter is called Tech Theology. And, you know, you could say, well, what is theology?

Why are you talking about theology? Why are you even arguing that you know, that tech has a theology? And I talked to a number of scholars of religion,  in the chapter, you know, many of whom really believe that while theology is universally accepted to be sort of a core Element of religion. It's sort of unclear what it is,  that there are many different definitions of what theology is.

But, I'll give you a sort of working definition for now, which is that,  it's the sort of bigger narratives, the bigger symbols that tell the overall, the overall, overarching stories of our religious traditions, what motivates us, why we believe what we believe, what we believe,  writ large and, you know, what we think we ought to do about it.

Justin Beals: I think my vision statement for our company fits that. Well, 

Greg Epstein: I mean, many probably do, right?. But I'll just say this, you know, the, you know, one of the most recognized and, arguably one of the most, you know, maybe even the most influential theological symbols. In the world today is the cross, right? You know, we cross, we see it almost everywhere.

You know, people wear it on their bodies all the time, and, you know, it symbolizes a number of things, but this idea that there was this person who, you know, came to Earth and died in a certain way and still lives in another way, etcetera, right? It's a whole story.  I think the most powerful, if I had to think about the most powerful theological symbol of tech, I might select the hockey stick, you know, the all powerful idea that you can go, in a short period of time, from relatively flat pedestrian, industrial activity you know, I make you a product, you pay me some money, I make a living, you get what you need, etcetera.

You can go from there to exponential. And maybe even existential growth.You know, that you can transcend economics to become, you know, some entirely new and glorious life form almost,  Right?  And so, you know, this is a story about two characters, real people, who've, who have given pseudonyms from different parts of that spectrum.

And so there's this,  young man. Javon, which is not the real name, to protect the identity. But this is very much a real person, was a student that I worked with as a chaplain closely, somebody that attended Harvard and Stanford, and works in both medicine and venture capital.

And somebody who was born to  such underprivileged or, difficult circumstances with, you know, teenage parents and you know, that barely knew that it's really not an exaggeration to me to say that he's one of the few Americans that I know to have changed casts, to have become a Brahmin Um, after having been almost an untouchable, 

Justin Beals: Incredibly difficult thing to do, right?

Like I know we say that, you know, this is land of opportunity, but there are challenges of making. Yeah, 

Greg Epstein: Yeah. You know, and like I said, I mean, I've spent 20+ years at Harvard,  hearing the intimate stories of people who go there and observing the, you know, the impacts of the institution on people, on society.

And I'll just say, like, this is probably the single most, single, most powerful example I've ever seen of somebody, you know, coming from low circumstances and through the tech world,  becoming, you know, one of the elite of our society.  And, you know, we sat one day as I was researching this book,  outside of  Stanford Medical School, and we talked about why Javon can had confided in me a few months earlier on social media, you know, via direct message that, although he'd had extraordinary success, you know, just far beyond the dreams of his,  I mean, his parents wouldn't, weren't even around or physically capable of taking care of him, but anybody that took care of him, he lacked the ability to feel happiness. And he didn't understand why. 

But he just couldn't connect to anything like joy, no matter how much he succeeded, no matter how much he achieved, you know, he would keep hearing that he was supposed to be happy and looking at people around him that seemed happy, but he didn't feel it. And he wanted to know why.

And, you know, I won't try to tell the whole story here, but I'll just say fast forward to, the middle of our conversation, you know, he's really getting into that, and he tells me about a classmate, that we'll call Chad, and Chad, also not his real name, Chad has a last name that if I told you who it was, you would instantly recognize it and it would become, a distraction, and, you know,  to our conversation and probably a danger to Javon.

So,  I'll just say, you know, telling me about his interactions with this classmate in business school, and I guess the idea that I want to get across is this is somebody who talked about the invisible hand of the market, which, you know, is something that he had been taught in a very deep way,  and, and sort of said, well. The invisible hand, like if that isn't a religious-sounding concept, I know, I don't know what is, right?.

And he was saying, you know, Javon had been educated, and people like Chad next to him had been educated,  to, you know, to, try to,  sort of harness this invisible power of the marketplace to transcend who they had been and become something glorious, something chosen for greatness, something that had a fundamental quality of glory that other humans simply don't and can't have.

And for Javon and for Chad in their different ways, you know, this became the kind of end all be all of life, you know, Javon trying to make it up the ladder and then realizing that no matter how high he climbed, you know, there was this feeling of emptiness and Chad realizing that no matter how much, um, he already had,, it was never enough.It was, you know, it was never, he would never, he was never powerful enough. He was never grand enough, glorious enough, and he just kept going, trying to reach that. 

And you know, it, the, the chapter is just sort of a story of the tragedy of how much of our economy. How much of our tech world, you know, is stories like that playing themselves out and is sort of our heartbrokenness because, you know, we're either on one side of the coin or the other.

Justin Beals:  Yeah. This really, this story really resonated with me as I read it. On one side, we have two people that come from very different circumstances. One, since he, a divine right, almost, if I can use a religious term to essentially be a leader in this environment. And the other having been invited into it from outside, never feeling like they could work hard enough to fully belong.

And yet the one that belonged may have not needed to work quite as hard, but feels like that they deserved the opportunity to guide it, and there's, you know, The invisible hand of the market always sounds to me like the holy ghost from my childhood. It is true. It's like, wait a second, are you telling us that the invisible hand of the market is some derivative of the balance sheet of all the stock traded? Like that is ridiculous. There are individuals making decisions at the end of the day. It is it is not some out all power, you full bean unless it crushes you, I guess. And then it feels all-powerful. Yeah. 

Greg Epstein: I mean, you know, the point is just that, you know, we're talking in those terms, whether we're talking about the one or the other, you know, we're that, that it's not an accident that we're talking about these invisible forces because in, you know, whether it is religion or tech, a lot of people are very hungry to transcend the sense that they are ordinary and become something extraordinary. You know,  there's a certain normalcy to that. You know, that pattern, especially in this kind of Western world where we're really told that the one thing that you can do to become worthwhile as a human being is to become transcendently extraordinary as a human being, that you have to be so good In order to be good enough,  and that if you are not that kind of transcendent level of talent, genius, intelligence, success, etcetera,you know, the mythology, the theology of this contemporary culture,  is that you're really less than and so much so that you might even deserve to live a life without dignity, a life of, of shame.

And, you know, it's not accidental at all that that is very much a mirror of Puritan theology. In the Puritan worldview, and, you know, think about, for example, the fact that the Puritans came here,  in the early, you know, the first half of the 17th century, they found Harvard in 1636 because they were, they had been too religious for England in the, at the time they, they sort of get kicked out of England, and then they found Harvard ultimately as a way of preserving their extreme theology.

And although they in many ways don't do it, they don't succeed, you know, Harvard becomes a much more liberal place, you know, within a few generations and then, and then continually, after that, there are certain ways in which they actually quite impressively preserved and passed on their culture because Puritans in short believe that there is a chosen group of people, God's elect who, you know, after death will be elevated to heaven, and everybody else goes to the other place, which is not a good place to be.  

And that there's nothing you can really do. You know,  to shift your deserving, you know, deservingness, from one to the other, all you can do is show off, essentially, through what has become known as the Protestant work ethic, that you are obviously a member of the elect.

Well, that's very, very similar. Of course, it's not exactly the same thing, of course I'm not suggesting that, but I'm saying it's eerily similar To the kinds of experiences that a lot of people have in the tech world. And that I think Javon has in this chapter, with his friend, Chad, where Chad is a member of the elect.

And Chad, you know, has been told throughout his life, both verbally and non-verbally, right? When Chad sees, you know, powerful people in the world, it's just a reaffirmation of his story. And of why he should, you know, is and should be great. And you know, Javon is trying to crack into that echelon, but it feels empty, it feels hollow for him. 

And you know, the question is, and but then ultimately realizes that  Chad is probably feeling a lot of emptiness and hollowness as well, that neither of them quite know how to connect with one another.  Although you know, they're ostensibly friends and want to work together, want to care about one another.

And I think we just see a lot of that. We see a lot of isolation in this technological culture. We see a lot of loneliness despite the fact that you know, in terms of raw numbers of points of contact, we should be more connected than ever before in history. And yet, if you really look around, I can't imagine you'll disagree that there's just so many lonely, isolated, feeling people in our technological world.

Justin Beals: Absolutely. And I think that you know, from the algorithms that are designed to maximize the attention economy through to the feeling, just the personal feeling of not being good enough,  it is pervasive. And part of this feels like, especially the concept of chosenness, for example, I feel like a lot of historical religions had an ethics about doing good in the world, but the tech religion, is really stripped that away. I mean, we pay a lot of word service to it, but we're capitalist entities trying to maximize the efficiency of the engine we build at the end of the day for profit. Nothing more.  I'm very plain. That's what all the companies I've built, they were businesses first in a way. 

Greg Epstein: YeahI mean, you know, and of course, you could say, in fact, that capitalism is the real religion, right?

And there's a lot about the sort of nature of capitalism as a whole. That looks very religious. And of course, you know, contemporary capitalism comes way before contemporary tech, and all that is true, you know, and in fact, I even had this story where,  as I'm hanging around Stanford that exact week, a couple days later, I go to one of the bookstores and I'm sort of looking around and I, I pull off this, I pull down this, little green leather bound, beautiful volume with, with real gold embossing, the gospel of wealth.

And, you know, this is, you know, right up here, Andrew Carnegie. And, um, you know, he was talking in those terms as an early technologist. The issue is, there's no form of techno of capitalism left on earth today that isn't in some way tech capitalism. Like, I think, you know, people in tech sometimes don't even recognize, or maybe they do, just how successful they've been that every kind of endeavor, business endeavor in the world now Is deeply enmeshed, fundamentally enmeshed with what we call contemporary tech. 

And so, you know, sure, it's just a sect from, you know, an offshoot of that original religion, you know, a kind of, you know, the way that maybe a Mormonism or a certain type of evangelical Christianity would be an offshoot of the sort of bigger mothership of Christianity.

But imagine, you know, a small offshoot of Christianity taking over the entire world. And that's, of course, by the way, what did actually happen in the fourth century. That's why I start the book with the story of Constantine because I just found it really amusing to think about the fact that Christianity really did exist for hundreds of years as a small Mediterranean cult, and part of my theological education was to study that and to study the fact that, you know, it's just a minor religion until the Holy Roman Emperor conquers his brother in law in a stunning act of family drama, reunites the once divided Holy Roman Empire, and, and spreads it around the world, and all of a sudden, Christianity becomes the religion. Well, that's essentially what happened with tech techno-capitalism as well. 

Justin Beals: I, this is such an intriguing topic area for me because one of my, just popular science areas that I'm reading a lot, lately is on the first 200 years of people following Jesus.

I find the diversity of beliefs so intriguing, and yet we have this vibrant what some people have described to me frothy um, which I think speaks to the vacuousness of some of the tech religion work that we do, environment that we're, we're living in. 

So I want to curve us a little bit back towards our title and, and maybe,  try to, we've, I've been fairly scared and terrified about the work that we do, but I think one of the things I love about the book, one of the reasons that I'm, I'm going to recommend it to a lot of people that I meet is that you bring it back to perhaps a mental model of how to engage in the work without, to your point, completely rejecting anything with the label tech.

Let's go back to tech agnosticism, and I love how you defined it. You know, finding comfort in unknowability. Maybe you can describe that for us a little bit. 

Greg Epstein: Yeah, So Tech Agnosticism,  just to be super clear. Again, this is not me saying that we need to reject all tech,or that, that technology is somehow fundamentally bad.

It's, it's not what I'm saying. It's not what the book is about. I wouldn't have any idea how to write a book like that.  And look, in the world of religion, I happen to be an atheist, right? I believe that human beings created religion and gods, not, you know, vice versa. But as I mentioned before, you know, I'm a certain kind of atheist where I like, not only the challenge, but the beauty of working alongside,  sharing deep relationships and, you know, common fate, with people who happen to disagree, right?

And so, you know, part of what I'm saying there, you know, it not only implying, but I want to directly say it is like, let's say I'm a tech agnostic, and I'm about to explain a bit more what I mean by that. And you're not,  right? You know, you're a tech enthusiast or, you know, an A.I. Enthusiast. I hear a lot or, you know, some of my friends would consider themselves ironically, perhaps to be tech evangelists, right? 

Okay, fine. When I walk into a room, though, as a humanist atheist, with colleagues from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and other traditions, Zoroastrian, among others, not only do I want to do good together as a community, an interfaith community, but, but I've seen it happen so many times that we do good together and we learn from one another, I learn from them just as much as I would hope that they would sometimes learn something good from me. 

And so, you know, not only am I not trying to like wrestle the tech enthusiast, the, you know, the  AI evangelist to the ground, you know, I'm sure that I will learn things from them at times and that I'm sure they'll have valuable contributions to make to the world.

However, I would hope that the ethos of agnosticism would help inform their work and certainly when and if they might get out in front of their skis to the point where there needs to be some accountability that we talk about because people in the most influential religion in the world are going to make very influential mistakes when they make mistakes.

I would hope that the agnostic impulse could kind of rein us in and give us a better moral framework than just unthinking, uncritical faith. And to illustrate that, at the end of the book, um, I talk about a visit that I made to a writer whose work I love. Her name is Lesley Hazleton. She lives on a boat in Seattle.

She's a, you know, noted journalist, long history with magazines like Time magazine, living in Jerusalem, reporting on religion there. Also, you know, has driven, race cars, u flown stunt planes. I mean, an amazing person. And she wrote this book called “Agnostic, a Spirited Manifesto”, which I completely ignored at first because I was trying to build my own entrepreneurial thing.

And I just, when, when her book came into my office, I was like off raising money and trying to build, build, build. Wanted my own hockey stick at the time. 

Justin Beals: We understand Greg. Yeah. 

Greg Epstein: Um, but I read the book later as I was writing this book and it was something really beautiful. I'll just read a very short quote from it.

“To be agnostic is to cherish both paradox and conundrum. It's to acknowledge the unknowable. And yet explore it at the same time and to do so with zest and to do so not only in a celebration of the life of the mind, but of life itself”. And to continue, she writes, “I stand tall in my agnosticism, because the essence of it is not merely not knowing, but something far more challenging, and more, and infinitely more intriguing the magnificent oxymoron inherent in the concept of unknowability. This is the acknowledgement that not everything may be knowable and that not all questions have definitive answers. At best, however, agnosticism goes farther. It takes a spirited delight in not knowing”. 

And there's something really powerful to me about that idea of a spirited delight in not knowing, this idea that the tech world, you know, of course, we know it's not perfect, and we know that it has some good things to it.

But, can we really take more time to focus on the fact that we don't know as much as we think we do about or as much as we like to tell ourselves or others about how all of this tech Is going to improve the world and be, you know, the right and good thing? Some of it will, but I want to see more evidence.

Because the impact of making these grand pronouncements, these prophetic statements about how the tech will save us. The impact is often quite severe on people in the here and now, not just in the, you know, millions of years from now future in the here and now in this world, people are suffering and even dying because of our grandiose technological choices.

And that's where I'd wish that we could see more agnosticism, more humility. Because, you know, maybe we will have to slow down in order to get to a better future. And, if so, so what? You know, so that's what we need. 

Justin Beals:  It's deeply valid.  And in that same chapter, as you talk about agnosticism, I think one of the truths that you highlight that we all need to be owners of, participate in tech, which is that the tech apocalypse is already here.

It's just unevenly distributed. And, certainly, I'm really grateful for your book, Greg. I learned a lot from reading it. I've often wanted a little more ethical roadmap, not necessarily a full description of what to do. But maybe a playbook for how to engage an understanding of what to do. And I felt like, um, that was one of the lessons that I gleaned from your book.

Greg Epstein: Well, thank you, Justin. That's it's really moving to hear, you know, cause if you're an author. And you work on a book for five, six years after sort of 10 years of struggle to figure something out for yourself like you don't want not to hear that, I mean, I'll, I'll also mention though, that, I think one of the reasons it works as a kind of discussion guide, or a kind of road map for conversations and for, for thinking, is because it's not, I mean, it's, I I'm the narrator, I'm a guide taking you through the book, but what I'm taking you through to is, these hundreds of conversations that I had with people, across the tech world and, you know, founders, engineers and funders, but also, gig workers, activists, critics, social workers, clergy, psychologists,  you know, a huge range of people that, had a, very different views, and insights and, you know, I introduce readers to each of these people and, together, I think that their voices really sing, to me at least. 

Justin Beals: Excellent. Well, we will be sure to have a link to purchase the book in the show notes. Really appreciate you joining us today, Greg.

It's been a treat to meet you. Thank you so much. No, thank you. And I wish you huge luck, in continuing to deliver the message. I think it's very valuable. 

Greg Epstein: It's a pleasure, Justin. Thanks for having me again and look forward to meeting in person sometime.