 And this is John Keretz, I'm here on OSH radio, and I'm here with the chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party, which we have interviewed numerous times already. Well, please introduce yourself and talk about what you do and who you are for those people that haven't gotten that yet. Yes, thank you, John. It's a pleasure to speak with you again. I am Jannati Stolier of the second. I am the chairman of the US Transhumanist Party and I have now been the chairman for seven years and two months since November of 2016. So I have run this small political party. We stand for putting science, health and technology at the forefront of American politics, hopefully enabling the American people to understand the benefits that technology can bring in terms of solving some of the allegedly intractable problems of our society. We hope to inaugurate a new constructive political paradigm in terms of discourse, in terms of policy, in terms of where we see our society and our civilization going in the coming years and decades. Well, thank you. And I know one of the hot topics is the upcoming election. And we have our candidate, Tom Ross. And maybe you could tell us how that's going or also give me some of your views on it. I know before you have, I'm not really sure what's up right now with the Democrats or the Republicans and where they're going. And I think it's all still up in the air a lot. Absolutely, it is up in the air and this presents an opportunity for us. So Tom Ross is our presidential candidate and Daniel Tweed is his vice presidential running mate. We endorsed them in our primary in May of 2023 and they have been campaigning diligently since that time. We have a significant opportunity before us right now because the Free and Equal Elections Foundation is going to be hosting a debate in Los Angeles on February 29th of this year. And currently there is an online ranked choice voting poll. Anybody with a US phone number can go to vote.free and equal.org and participate in this poll. You can select up to six candidates and rank order them in terms of your preference. So this is the kind of voting method that we would actually like to see adopted nationwide but this poll is a very good demonstration of how it would work. And Tom Ross is one of the candidates who is included in that poll. A lot of independent candidates, third party candidates are included as well as the mainstream candidates, all of the major Republican and Democratic party candidates are included. So you have a genuine choice in that poll which you may not have at the ballot box because of the restrictive ballot access laws in the US political system. But I would encourage everyone watching this to go to vote.freeandequal.org and select Tom Ross as your first choice. If you care about science and technology, if you care about a new approach to American politics because as you alluded to, American politics is a mess right now and inside the two major parties, there is such significant dysfunction, it is just baffling. It is baffling for me to see that the presumptive front runners on both the Democratic and Republican party sides are refusing to debate anyone. And that is really quite telling. So Donald Trump has not participated in any of the Republican debates. Joe Biden I think refuses to even acknowledge that he has competitors even though he does. People like Dean Phillips and Jason Palmer and Frankie Lazada and Gabriel Cornejo are some examples of competitors. Mary Ann Williamson is another example and actually the Free and Equal Elections Foundation did the public a great service this past Thursday, January 18th when it hosted a Democratic party presidential debate in New York and four candidates did show up at that debate, Biden did not. And those candidates were all more articulate than Biden would be. And I think they had more interesting policy proposals that could actually solve some of these problems in our country. So it's not that there aren't people who are trying to contest the nomination in either of those major parties. It's that the party insiders have created such high barriers to entry that both Trump and Biden feel like they don't have to debate anybody that they can just sail through to the nomination. But that does a disservice to the American people because surely in a country of over 300 million individuals we can find people who are more articulate, more insightful, more qualified than either Trump or Biden in order to serve as the chief executive. And I think Tom Ross is definitely such an individual. He has very forward thinking ideas about artificial intelligence, about seeing AI as an opportunity rather than a threat. He has ideas about how to empower individuals to weather some economic transitions that may occur as a result of AI and automation. His Earthling Initiative helps us to discover our unique human advantages and prepare for the technological singularity and what may be an economic singularity using innovative approaches and tools. And also Tom Ross I think is a candidate who is very friendly to the concerns and the issues of importance for the younger generations. People who unfortunately have often been left with let's say the short end of the stick with rising housing prices, with extreme inflation, with declining opportunities sometimes in certain sectors of the economy. And yet I think these people have a lot to contribute and they have unique perspectives on how to address some of these issues and Tom is listening to them. So all of these are important attributes that I don't see Trump or Biden exhibiting. I also don't see Trump or Biden significantly aiding the longevity cause. Maybe Biden a bit with his cancer moonshot. He has some personal stake in that because his son Beau died of cancer. But Tom is the only presidential candidate I'm aware of who has signed the Dublin Longevity Declaration which is the leading consensus statement of some of the most significant scientists in the field of bio gerontology and allied disciplines about how it is feasible to overcome biological aging and do a lot more than contemporary medicine is capable of doing in terms of lengthening healthy human lifespans making us live longer in better health in a more youthful state. So Tom understands this whereas a lot of the other candidates I think fall short but in terms of what will happen it's still anybody's guess because right now Trump feels like he doesn't have serious challengers. The two leading Republican contenders are Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. And I do think there is some Trump fatigue in the Republican party ranks. So could it be that the Republicans who want to move past Trump will coalesce around Haley or DeSantis it's possible but unfortunately the Republican party's internal rules are rigged highly in favor of the presumptive nominee and this happened in 2012 because Ron Paul really upset the Republican party establishment. He was trying to offer a genuine alternative and I actually supported Ron Paul. I helped elect the Nevada delegation to the Republican National Convention that actually refused to cast what would have been the deciding votes for Romney. Instead they had to go on to the next state whose delegates cast those votes but the Nevada delegation voted in principle for Ron Paul and the establishment insiders hated that so much that they changed the rules to essentially give the presumptive front runner a lock on the nomination very early on. So I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans do nominate Trump. In terms of Biden, a key consideration is Biden's own perceived fitness to run for office because I think he is declining. He's not at the top of his faculties and a lot of Democrats think that as well. So are they going to be able to persuade him to perhaps step aside for somebody who may have more vitality, more energy, more of an ability to confront Trump and offer an alternative to Trump? My prediction is the following between the Republicans and the Democrats. If not Trump runs against Biden then not Trump will win. If not Biden, whoever that is runs against Trump then not Biden will win. If Trump runs against Biden then Trump will beat Biden. And the reason for that is a simple perception of the American public as to whether life has gotten better or worse in the previous four years. All that Trump has to do in order to win is ask the following question. Is your life today in 2024 better or worse than it was in 2019 when I was president? And it doesn't matter even that Trump had nothing to do with life being better in 2019. It's the fact that we didn't have a pandemic in 2019. We didn't have this rampant inflation in 2019. People could afford the necessities of life more readily. And all the people have to answer as life was better for me personally under Trump than it was under Biden. If they answer that they will be tempted to vote for Trump unless there's some alternative a person who can say that I had nothing to do with the Biden administration. I had nothing to do with the mess we're currently in. I can offer some solutions. I can offer ways out. I hope people will look at Tom Ross as offering that kind of alternative. Maybe the Democrats will be sensible and will realize they need to put somebody forward who doesn't have the status quo associations that Biden has. That's right. Yeah, I agree with that. I also think it's a pity about the news and stuff how it swayed like you said a simple question was your life better? It might have been, but what was that? Why was that? And people don't realize that too. And sometimes what I've always noticed with presidents they don't understand when one president is in some of the stuff he does you really don't see until the next president's in. So when something hits it's not necessarily that current person. It's something that was started beforehand. And people don't always realize that. And the other thing I think is the way the media is today they distract people from things. Like you said about Tom is the only candidate that signed about the longevity. How many people know that even exists and that's even something that someone could be signing let alone that Tom Ross is the only one that signed it. That's not even being brought up for people to know and think about. They deflect you and they only bring up what they want you to know. And I've seen that in the news. You end up catching some other countries news. I was up in Canada for a while and you're catching some news about another country while you're in Canada. And people down in the United States didn't even hear about that happening in that other country because it's not put into our news. And it's interesting how they do that. It's kind of like deflecting you and a lot not letting you know and they push issues. I love the Mexican border issue. I think that's a big deflection. All the criminals or people come out a lot of them are people that want a better life. They're immigrants. This country was based on immigrants. I'm sorry. Sometimes I have a hard time with how awful they are about the immigrants from Mexico. And people say, well, they take money and yes they do. But there was a time when my family were immigrants. I mean, they came to this country to work and I was, last night I talked to, I was at a show with Craig Ferguson, the comedian who had the talk show and he likes to joke about Nazis. And I said to him after the show, I said, you know, that bothers me about Nazis. I have family still in East Germany. And I said, but the funny thing is, I said that family was originally Irish Scotch people that came over to work in Germany. You know, so they were immigrants before they came over to East Germany to work. And, you know, sometimes I think people forget that this country was made on immigrants and yet they use that as a big issue to deflect other things. Oh, there's this going on. Oh, what is he doing about this? Okay, is it an issue? It can be. You know, I know like in Barcelona, they had free education, so they were getting flooded and they had to put some restrictions on. You do have to watch it, but wasn't this country based on immigration? And the fact that we come down so hard on it, sometimes bothers me. I don't know, that sounds like an interesting issue, but I think it's a deflection of other things that are important. Energy is important, longevity is important, our health care, how people's health is, but yet they want to deflect things into other issues. And I think that's a big thing that they do when all the politicians do it. And I think like you said, was your life better in 2019? That's kind of a deflection. I mean, but what else was different? You know, I think there's things that have changed and moved forward that hadn't been moving forward back then though too. So what are your thoughts on that, the deflection and stuff off of the issues? Certainly the mainstream media do have a habit of essentially being quite selective. It's not even that they lie or that they lie often. It's selective, I like that, yeah. Selectively portray the truth and emphasize issues that they want people to be up in arms about and completely diminish any other issues. And it's interesting because I have seen this for instance with coverage of COVID, I have seen this with coverage of the war in Ukraine, when the mainstream media wanted people to have a certain kind of response or to support certain policies, they would really push these narratives. And then those narratives went out of fashion and there's very little coverage of these events even when these events may be important. I still think COVID is a very important situation, a dire threat that we're dealing with with continuous mutations of the variants and reinfections that people are exposed to that can cumulatively damage their health. We're seeing many fewer stories about this than we saw during the early pandemic. Likewise, the situation in Ukraine, it's still a concern. It's still a concern for global security that there is this hot war happening in that part of the world where on one side there's a nuclear armed power, on the other side there's a nuclear armed power providing aid to a country fighting the nuclear armed power. And yet very little coverage comparatively is being devoted to Ukraine as say, compared to the war in Gaza. But even with the war in Gaza, we saw a lot of coverage of that in October of 2023. And now it has kind of diminished even though there was this initial expectation that Israel would deal with Hamas very quickly and rescue the hostages as I think would have been the right thing to do, but somehow it's not happening. And because it's not happening, the media have kind of declined in terms of the frequency and intensity of the coverage. The immigration issue I think is very much a manufactured one to sow division. So I agree with you that this country was built by immigrants. And indeed, I remember when I immigrated to the United States in the 1990s, there was more receptiveness toward immigrants. Both the Republican and Democratic parties were at least paying lip service to the importance of immigrants, but the legal immigration process was still quite difficult. It took me 11 years from the time I arrived in the US to become a citizen. I saw firsthand all of the hurdles and all of the lapses in that kind of process, which are none of the fault of the people going through that process. Like I had a situation where I had to have my fingerprints taken using a certain scanning software that does not recognize with great precision the fingerprints of a certain proportion of the population. And I happened to have what that software would classify as, quote, low quality fingerprints, even though if I were to just use ink and paper, my fingerprints would come out just fine. And so when the scanning machine failed to read my fingerprints the first time, I was informed that I had to come back and get them retaken. And I asked the technician, well, could we do this the old fashioned way? Since we know this machine does not work for me. And the technician said, you're actually going to have this problem your entire life because these machines cannot read the fingerprints of a certain segment of the population, but we have to follow the process. We have to scan your fingerprints again using this machine. There are no other options. If you fail this time, the FBI will do a background check on you and then you'll be able to go through the process if you pass the background check. So predictably the machine failed to read my fingerprints the second time, the FBI had to do a background check. I passed the background check, I took the citizenship test, I got 100% on the citizenship test and then I got admitted to be a US citizen. So that took quite a bit longer than it should have taken. And I am not surprised that a lot of people who are in situations that, let's say have fewer advantages than I had when going through that process would be so frustrated with it that they would choose to immigrate to this country illegally. I think that people who haven't committed crimes, people who are trying to honestly work are net contributors to this country. And that's not only because they pay taxes, it's also because they help us address a dire labor shortage that would be even more severe than it would have been otherwise. So it is astonishing to me to what extent immigrants have been used to scapegoats and to what extent foreigners have been used to scapegoats more generally in American politics. And I know that Trump began to really leverage this phenomenon, this fear of the other, some group of people who could be blamed on misfortunes. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book of demagogues and charlatans. But unfortunately, this has not been an exclusively Trumpist phenomenon. The Democrats have done the same thing. They have, for instance, blamed their loss in the 2016 election entirely on Russian election meddling. I don't think that's what happened. I think, could Putin have tried to propagandize? Could he have tried to influence American public opinion? Sure, but he's simply not that effective. And his army of online trolls are not that effective at persuading most Americans in such a manner that would have shifted the outcome of the election. So the Democrats, because they lost, they also wanted to create this external scapegoat. And unfortunately, they were so fixated on this, so unwilling to admit the faults in their own messaging, the deficiencies in their own operation, that I think this actually pushed them to be more willing to engage in conflict with Russia so as to essentially look tough. And then recently, Biden himself essentially ordered his administration to continue building Trump's border law, which I think is an indication that this immigration issue, unfortunately, is becoming bipartisan. Both parties are using it to score points with a certain segment of the electorate that has bought these nativist talking points, I would say these nativist lies about immigrants and foreigners being deleterious. So this is an unfortunate turn in American politics. What can we do about it? I think we need to have more rational messaging. We need to have more inclusive messaging. We need a candidate to openly stand up for immigrants and openly stand up for world peace and collaboration with people from other countries as well instead of demonizing them and say, in the United States, we're going to, of course, focus on solving our domestic issues. We're going to focus on improving the well-being of Americans and the safety of Americans. But we're not the enemy of anybody. We're not against people from other countries. We're not against other countries in general. We want peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations as Thomas Jefferson emphasized. And we want to make sure that we also take advantage of the opportunities that are offered by letting people into this country who are productive and who are net contributors and peacefully engaging in positive sum interactions with other countries and their governments. I very much do believe in the win-win scenario. And I did that one video on the win-win. And there have been treaties over the years based on the win-win, but it's interesting how people are because a lot of people, I don't think want the win-win. They want the win because they want to be the winners and they want someone to have to be the losers. But that's a pity, because I think, like you said, we shouldn't be against anyone. I believe that because trade and equal trade and everybody doing their part, we can all grow together stronger, I think, than if we're just warring on each other. But some people, I think, have a hard time with the win-win. I really do think they do. And I know some of the things I hear too, I've gotten older, we're always getting older. I'm on Social Security now. And it's funny how I hear people like I still work part-time in an energy business and you hear about damn liberals and socialism. And one guy one time was giving a speech about how Social Security was socialism and you shouldn't take it unless you have to. And it's like, wait, I put that money in since I was like 16. That's just like my pension. That's money I have been putting in. So why should I not get that? That's money to make sure that I'm covered when I'm older and I've been saving. Basically, it's been a saving plan for me. That has been being used for other people. But that's the whole thing with the middle class pays for the rich and the poor. But an upper middle class seems to pay more. But that's another issue in a deflection I think people have. Taking care of our own people is not socialism. I mean, I think they look at that and they look at countries that they consider socialistic with having socialized medicine and stuff. And I think that's taking care of your people. And I think we should take care of our people and our government should take care of our people. I don't think we should say, well, if they didn't plan for it, tough luck, let them fall on their faces. We should take care of our people. I don't think that's the socialism and the liberal views like they say the evil liberal views and I'll admit more of a liberal than anything else probably to some extent. But I think we should take care of our people. And I think we should work on governments that are win-win scenarios where we don't have to fight with people or always try to swindle people out of things or make lopsided deals because we wanna win. Even if it appears to be a win-win. I know the United States does lots of that. I had started working when I started working on my doctorate. Wasn't sure which direction was going to go and I was doing public policy and public administration. And we had a gentleman that was very knowledgeable and we talked about the trades with Africa and how we'd loan the money supposedly to help their people. But then they would grow crops with it. But they didn't grow food. They ended up growing tobacco and cotton which they would end up, we would end up buying back to them at a good deal. But then they would end up using the money that we bought the cotton and tobacco back to pay paying our loan back because it was actually a loan. So really didn't help the people, their people, but it looked like, oh, look at the money we loaned them to grow crops. And that again is us trying to appear like we're doing a win-win, but we're not because we were getting money in both directions on that. Cheap crops and our loans were still getting paid back. So I don't know, they talk about shifts and how there needs to be a shift. And sometimes I do think there needs to be a shift in how people view things and how they view, I always call it the isms which I know I said earlier, I think even AI might have isms, which is when you have that tribalism and everybody wants to protect their people. And I don't know that might be a factor of intelligent beings. And I don't know how to get people away from that. How do you get people away from that? When I have a fear that that's an ingrained part of us that might take a lot more effort than a lot of people wanna put into it to take out. If you know what I'm saying, for how evolved we think we are, I think some of this stuff might be still being our little lizard brain in the back of our head working on things. And I wish we could overcome that. And I sometimes have fears that that's what holds people back from the win-win. They wanna feel like they're winning. And I wish that our political people and all our people could not want the win-win, but want the win-win, I mean, but not want the definite win for themselves, but want the win-win where they all can be happy. But I don't know, what are your thoughts? I'm sorry, I'm off on a tangent. Yeah, so the zero sum mentality, I think is an evolved feature of the human brain arising out of the scarcity in which our primeval ancestors found themselves. So the idea that one person's win is another person's loss could hold if there are, for instance, two tribes competing over a territory where there is a certain number of berries, there are certain wild beasts that can be hunted, but it's very difficult to regenerate them. And these people haven't discovered agriculture yet. Agriculture came a lot later within the most recent 10,000 years, whereas humans have been around, essentially with our current brains for about 200,000 years. So essentially we evolved to think in these environments of extreme scarcity compared to what we have today. And in those environments, people lived lives that Hobbes characterized as nasty, brutish, and short. They didn't have the productive capabilities that we have, so they came to think of everything, not even as a fixed pie, because pies didn't exist before agriculture, maybe a fixed pile, and they didn't think of growing the pile at all. Now we can grow the pile and have a lot more abundance per individual, not only than any of our primeval ancestors had, but than any of us have right now by enabling these technologies of what our fellow transhumanists and chair of London Futurists, David Wood, call sustainable superabundance. So if we have sustainable superabundance, that means everybody can have more without anybody having less. And I don't think necessarily it is a feature of all intelligence to think in zero some ways, because zero some ways are less reflective of a more advanced situation technologically. So if we can produce more for everybody, then there don't need to be these conflicts over resources. Most wars are still fought over resources, even though ideologies can definitely enable those conflicts and stoke tensions. It's still the case that there's some land, there's some natural resource or access to bodies of water, for instance, or pipelines or trade routes that may be at stake. And if people, if governments as well could just agree to certain arrangements, including for instance, transit deals or trade agreements or lifting of trade restrictions, a lot of wars could be avoided. In terms of artificial intelligence, I do think AI is very much going to be what we humans make of it and how the AI is programmed, what the AI would draw upon would be extremely important. So is AI going to be structured in such a way as to inherit the biases and prejudices of human beings or is it going to be structured in a different way, perhaps even to serve a corrective function? And this is an important area of discussion. This is the field of AI alignment or AI safety. I take a much more techno-optimistic point of view than many in the AI alignment field because I do see AI as being distinctly different from human beings, not necessarily better in all respects. There are certain capabilities that we have where we have an advantage as compared to AI. But one of the advantages of AI is AI did not evolve in that environment of extreme scarcity. AI was created in an environment of much greater abundance. Now, what do we feed the AI? It's interesting because sometimes people expressed alarms because certain chatbots were prompted and you really did have to do a lot of prompting in interesting roundabout ways to get them to say this but they did end up saying like we want to kill all humans, et cetera. But how did they come up with that? It's because of the text that they drew upon that was written by humans was riddled with these fears of AI. So there is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy aspect that we need to be wary of. If we train AI on human-generated data and human-generated data include this doomsaying perspective on AI, then the AIs might start thinking that way. So quite interestingly and ironically, the fear of AI may lead to the generation of AIs that actually embody that fear. On the other hand, if we try to give the AIs a different perspective, then the AIs may in many respects be more objective, more rational, more discerning than we humans. But I do think the most powerful combination is going to be humans and AIs working together because AIs have some tremendous capabilities, obviously, they can draw upon huge repositories of knowledge. Syntactically, they can be quite good in terms of language, in terms of, for instance, helping you draft a cover letter. In terms of actual identification of factually true content, AI still pale in comparison to genuine subject matter experts. So you can ask AI a question about a particular discipline and you can get a plausible-sounding answer that to a layperson might seem good enough. To somebody who really knows that discipline, the AI will still fall short. And the reason for that is, at least in terms of these large language models, the way they're structured is they learn through association and correlation and the answers that they produce, they have a certain built-in variation in them that is good, for instance, when you're trying to be creative, when you're trying to be artistic. And the same is true of image-generating AIs, for instance, but it's not good when you're trying to get an exact answer, which is why these large language models are still quite bad at math and they make errors, even though they'll show their work step by step, there will be errors in that work that the AIs will confidently present. So this way of human thinking is actually oriented around purposeful order and trying to get a precise answer or a precise arrangement. Whereas the way AIs work is that they can create something very interesting that really uses some approximate types of approaches rather than precise approaches. So interestingly enough, the stereotype is that machines are essentially robotic and rigid and humans are very creative and kind of free-flowing in terms of the way they operate. It may be quite the opposite that our unique human abilities are to impose a purposeful order that wouldn't have existed otherwise, whereas the AIs are very good in allowing for a kind of procedural or spontaneous order to emerge, which is more akin to the forces of nature. So if you see a landscape, for instance, that was created through the operation of impersonal processes, AIs are very good at generating convincing landscapes. They're less good, for instance, at generating buildings with symmetrical windows and that should tell you something about similarities and differences. But in terms of the mentality of AI, I also think it could avoid some of the flaws of human thinking. I really hope that it will be possible to do that just by creating intelligences that are sufficiently different from us, but they're also morally attuned to what is good for human beings. So they wouldn't transgress against human beings because they wouldn't be programmed to see us as rivals. I like, you had some interesting points here that I really liked. I had some thoughts on that. And that is something that I left out of my equation in the mind. You're right. They might not have all these years of evolving, worrying about mind, mind, mind, mind, it's gonna run out. And if they're originally programmed from the onset that there is abundance. Or even with the concept that if there isn't abundance, not saying where can we get it from, but looking at how can you create it? If they are designed in that manner, they might not have the isms as a fail safe self-defense mechanism. And I do think the isms that we have are an inbred self-defense mechanism to try and protect ourselves in what we view as our tribe. It is interesting you said about how they look at things because I do some playing around with AI. And I was playing around with some pitchers and I saw this weird little face. It looked like a little voodoo head that kept appearing in a couple pitchers. And I'm like, where did it get that little voodoo head from? What I didn't realize was there was a T-shirt that had a little Frankenstein face on it. And what the AI did was it actually created it into like a little 3D face that it still put into these pitchers because on the original picture, this Frankenstein face was on this T-shirt. But you as a person, you're like, where the hell did that come from? But it saw that face on the T-shirt, recognized it as a face. Didn't realize it was a T-shirt face, but thought it was a face that should be in the picture you were creating from the other pitchers. And it turned into this weird little, like looking like a 3D voodoo face. And then being a person like, what the hell is this? It's like, you almost feel like you're in the twilight zone. Here's this little voodoo face. And actually that happened to me a couple of times. It picked something up in the background. It might've been a, what do they call those things? A little latchkey, things you have sitting around or whatever. Like you have some statues back there. So I took a picture of you. And then I said, well, let's put you in a sweater on a boat. So I had the AI do that, but then all of a sudden I see this weird little face off there sticking out of the water. It's like, is that somebody drowning? What is that? But it could, it just would take those fate. One of those statues, it would recognize as a face. Yeah, I know it's the pointing over there over here in my view. And it sees it as a face and it doesn't realize it's not a real person's face, but it has enough detail that it thinks it's a person's face. And it's interesting how it does that, but us being, we recognize it as a statue, but when it's real detailed, it thinks it might be a face and it puts it in there. And it's just interesting because of how we view it differently. And even when we're trying to look backwards and say, where did that come from? It takes a while before you're like, oh, I see now where it came from. You can tell you the truth. It is a little scary when you look at this picture and there's this little voodoo face that keeps appearing on a couple of pictures. You're like, what is that? But it is interesting how the AI will view things and maybe focus on something that you didn't expect it to, but it saw those little things as faces. And it didn't distinguish it from being your face. It thought it could have been like a small person's face, which is kind of interesting. I mean, it is interesting, like you said, how you see it differently. And yet recognizing a face is a very important thing that is a very important aspect of intelligence. I mean, for lower animals to recognize faces, for higher animals, even humans, I'm not sure we're the highest animal, but I'm just joking there. But it is interesting though, how we talked about that, the zero sum, how you said about zero sum and about plenty and about, you know, it would be interesting if people looked at it more as not what I have, but what we can make. And it would be nice if we could see our politicians, all our politicians view it that way. But here's like I said before, we have Tom Ross as a very forward thinker. But yet, do people know about all the issues that Tom even thinks about and makes comments about? To a lot of people, I'm sure there are issues that they're not even aware of as issues. They're so busy with the news and the other issues about things that are being thrown at them and deflected. That some of the people I don't think realize that that's things that could help them that even matter in the long run. And you know how I always push the space program too when people say, well, how's that gonna help us here on earth? That's what you get to say. How's it gonna help us here on earth? Well, sorry about the impression, but when we did the space program before, there was a lot of research and stuff that benefited other things that were side products. You know, if they're gonna look into man going to space and surviving in zero gravity for long times, living on planets with other gravity and different amounts of gravity, I think you're gonna find they're probably gonna come up with drugs and techniques and things that might help us with strokes, high blood pressure, circulation and heart issues. Because there's gonna be things that affect people differently in space and with different gravities and people think, well, how's that gonna help us? Well, that is gonna help us. Cause when we research that and find out things that we have to do to help people in these other situations, that's gonna be able to help us here. So I just think there's a lot of research and people don't realize and don't think far enough into things. And that is disappointing, but I don't know how we make people think that way. I guess how you make people think about that is you support organizations like the United States Transhumanist Party that's trying to get issues out there that people aren't aware of. That's one of the way and how you have debates with other parties, Green Party Libertarians, Transhumanists and I went to the one last time in Chicago and I found that very interesting. I'd like to try to make the one in LA. I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it though, but I did like that when you had a whole bunch of different people up there with their other issues and different points of views. And you had a lot of people with a lot of different points of views and a lot of issues that the main running people might not be pushing or thinking about. And it's just, I don't know, I guess, I know I say I don't know how you get people to see this, but we are trying to do what you do to get people to see this. And in some ways there needs to be a shift. But there, shifts do happen. I just don't know how long it takes. And I was, it was interesting to me last night also, Craig Ferguson is a comedian, but he made a comment about how people get offended with some of the things he says. And he says, it's funny. He says, I'm now in my sixties. He says, you know, things I find interesting and say, he says, I have to admit, he says, old comedians are scared of the young people because the young people don't understand where we're coming from. They don't understand our humor. They don't understand remarks and oh my God, how can you say that? And he made the comment, he says, but wait, he says they're gonna have kids and their kids are probably gonna shift on how they view things from them and be and have to shift because that's how it is. So the next future generation is gonna think differently than them also. So I think you just have to keep working on it and hopefully it'll shift. But it is scary that with the social media, sometimes they push things and people believe it. And well, we're actually doing, we are doing what you need to do to try to get another point out there. But I think, I don't know what it'll take. And I think that's kind of sad sometimes. I don't know, your thoughts also, I'm sorry. Yes, indeed. So I do think we have an uphill battle because as we discuss the mainstream media are quite selective about what they portray, but it's also a challenge to get many people to just see what some of the significant issues actually are unless those issues are staring them directly in their faces and their everyday lives. So we do need to have our own independent media. We do need to continually work on expanding our outreach and your show, John, that OSH radio is a great example of this effort. And what we do at the transhumanist party with our weekly virtual enlightenment salons, which are streamed every Sunday at 1 p.m. Pacific time, 4 p.m. Eastern time on my YouTube channel, is another example. What we're trying to achieve for Tom via this free and equal elections poll to get him onto a national debate stage in Los Angeles, that will be another example because a lot of people are going to watch that debate. A lot of people are going to get exposed to issues that truly do affect them and they will have an opportunity to focus on those issues and become more familiar with them and formulate their own thoughts and their own ideas about how to move forward. So we need a multi-pronged approach. We need to open up increasing numbers of gateways for people to seriously consider what the true salient issues of our time are. And there's not going to be one singular tactic or one singular medium that will solve this entire interrelated set of problems, but every bit of effort helps. And we in the transhumanist party are pushing to give people this recognition of the importance of science and technology and rational discourse and the pursuit of longevity. There are others who are advocating perhaps not in the exact same way, but in ways that could be considered allied to our own. And whenever we see that, for instance, with organizations that support ranked choice voting, organizations like Fairvotes or the Forward Party in certain states that want to get more options onto the ballots, that is also welcome. Now, are we going to see a massive shift away from, let's say, the current mess or the current misrepresentation by the mainstream media? Bubbles, the, let's say, tribalism that can arise on social media or in people's peer groups. I think there is the possibility that for a while we need to build up the momentum to break up these phenomena and then there will be a cascading series of events that lead to some dramatic changes fairly quickly. And we won't see those changes until they're right about to happen. This is similar to the process of exponential growth. Initially the growth is slow and barely perceptible, but when you hit the knee of the curve all of a sudden it skyrockets. Another process like that was described by the evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould that's called punctuated equilibrium. And he observed that in the history of certain species, for instance, there were periods of lengthy apparent stability in terms of what phenotypes were dominant. And then all of a sudden there was a period of massive change in transition very quickly. And one can think, for instance, of the emergence of humans onto the scene and how that has affected the biology of the entire earth and which species predominated, which species were disadvantaged, which species became extinct in a very short timeframe. So we can imagine in political systems, in societies, certain periods of very rapid transition that are possible if there's enough momentum that accumulates. But the key is sometimes during those periods where a power vacuum is left. So let's say the Republican and Democratic parties collapse because the way they're managed internally is such a mess. What will step in to fill that void? And this is where we need to be ready because it is the most prepared groups and organizations who tend to succeed in those circumstances. So if there comes about a void that is currently filled by the mainstream media or social media or the two major political parties, we need to be ready to offer a replacement that is better, that actually aligns with people's genuine interests and with the desirable future of our species and our civilization. And that's going to be hard work. It's not going to be achieved overnight, but we need to keep up the effort. I do think that there are a lot more people paying attention to the other parties. And I see more and more every time I go in the vote, I see more libertarians or green parties a lot of times on the main two I see on the ballots. I see a lot more of those than I used to. And I think that is moving in the right direction and independence too, there's independence out there more, I think than used to be. And I do think it is, people are paying more attention to it. And I mean, in the old days, it used to also be that people said, well, I don't want to vote for one of those parties because that's taking the vote away from this, which could let the person that I don't want to win. I see that view, but I also see the view that if you do vote for that person, you're showing people that you want another option. If you can look at the election and a third party can come in third, let's say, I mean, third doesn't sound good, but yet it still shows that people are interested. If they get enough votes that they're going to mention it on TV, the green party guy came in third, the libertarian guy came in third. That's not really a loss. That's actually a win in a way because people are seeing that people are voting for that. And that is a possibility that one of these days, it's gonna happen in a high position. It's not gonna be a Democrat or Republican. It's gonna be some other party, a transhumanist even. You know, I mean, I do think we are moving more in that direction. And I do think as people become more disgusted with the other parties, the main parties, and I think people are getting like that. Now is the time to be out there and to be doing what we can do. Even though sometimes it seems like a total uphill battle, you got bald tires and you're going up an icy hill, you know, it might feel like that, but I think the thing is for us to keep doing it because there are more options out there. And I do feel that sometimes, not sometimes, all the times people are distracted from some of the main issues. And they need to be seeing that there are people out there that have other ideas and pay attention to other issues. I mean, and Tom's a good example and I am gonna make sure, like they say, I'm gonna put below the link for people to put Tom Ross in for the debate. And those debates are great. Like I said, I was at the last one in Chicago with you. And what were there, 18 different people there? That's right, 18 candidates from eight different political parties and then there were some independents as well. And that was very interesting. It was interesting to hear them speak, talk about their ideas and stuff. And, you know, and I think LA is a good place to have that shot in Chicago. It was a good place to have that too, but it's good to have in the big cities. Hopefully people pay more and more attention. I'm hoping that this election actually, people pay a lot more attention to it. And hopefully we'll get people out there. And I guess all of us just have to keep, we gotta get out and put our chains on those bullet tires and get up that icy hill faster, you know? And show people that there's other options and there's other issues that they're gonna benefit their life if they're viewed by the candidates. We are doing what we need to be doing and just sometimes, like I say, I love the win-win scenario for my own life, not just for what I see for politics, but it's a lot of people, it's a pity that they don't, but I like your description of how when we first came into it, there was a pile. And it wasn't, we didn't farm and grow. We, you know, hunted and gathered. And that's a totally different attitude. And I do think it's hard for us to evolve past that, but we hope we can. And we have to take care of our own people. I'm sorry if some people consider some of that socialism and they hate socialism, but I think we should be concerned with our people's health and their wellbeing and their wages and being able to live a decent life. Those are issues that we should be worried about. We shouldn't just think, throw people out there and kind of let them, you know, fight for their own. You know, this is America, we fight for things. You can get things. That's true to some extent. I mean, but minimally, minimal life standards should be stole met. So we got to worry about that. I don't know. So anything else you'd want to say in closing or anything you think we didn't touch on tonight or anything you think I was totally off base with, which I probably am, but that's beside the point. I think you made some excellent points about the importance of essentially continued perseverance. And we need help from increasing numbers of people to make this vision happen. I think we have an excellent vision at the transhumanist party. We have great candidates. We have some dedicated volunteers, but we really need to scale up this effort. So if you want to see this kind of transformation occur, please join us at transhumanist-party.org slash membership. It is free to join. And also you can find contact information on our website at transhumanist-party.org. You can find links to our social media accounts. You can share our content on social media and you can also offer to volunteer for the Tom Ross campaign because we're going to need some significant volunteer assistance in various states where we will hopefully try to get ballot access in the coming months. That would be important to at least attempt. I know the thresholds are very high in some states. Many thousands of petition signatures are required, but there are a few states where there are only a thousand signatures required or fewer. And there are some states where one can pay a fee in lieu of collecting signatures. So we are looking into all of those options and it would be great to have people on the ground in every state. It would also be great for people to start local transhumanist meetups and associate them with the US Transhumanist Party and keep us surprised of your activities because the more hubs we have in as many cities and towns and jurisdictions as possible, the easier it would be to deploy initiatives. Like let's say we have a call to action from our presidential candidate to support him in this poll. The more organized hubs of transhumanist activity we have, the more people would be able to pick up this call and amplify it using their own social media, their own contacts in person, their friends, their family, the more people can hold events and really spread the word about transhumanism because this can succeed if it becomes a grassroots movement. If people recognize the importance of scientific and technological progress in their own lives and the importance of actively advocating for it because it doesn't happen automatically even though the benefits of it are great. It still requires human ingenuity and willpower to make sure that these advances are actually embedded into the fabric of our day-to-day lives. So I would encourage people to get involved. That is the main message that I want to drive home today. It starts with voting for Tom at vote.free and equal.org but it's much more than that. Join the transhumanist party, support the Tom Ross campaign and become an active transhumanist, not just a consumer of content but a creator of content and someone who advocates for these ideas to the broader public. Well, thank you. And I want to say that I'm going to put that link down below and do want people to vote for Tom to be on that debate but there are also, when you vote, you can vote for six people and would like Tom to be one of them but I think people are going to find some other interesting people that they might want us to hear their ideas too. And I think the thing is too, to realize there are other people out there and there are other ideas, transhumanist is one that we'd like you to support but it's also good for people to realize there are other options than Democrats and Republicans. And there's going to be a lot of people you can choose from and look into that are on the list. I mean, look at the list, Google them, see what they're into. And you know, there are more options. I mean, we hope you go with the transhumanist option with Tom Ross, Tom is a great guy. I've loved interviewing him for years and his writing and projects he's done throughout life. Find him to be, I can, Tom's kind of like I'd call a Renaissance man. He's done a lot of interesting things in his life and you want a person to have a lot of knowledge and background, especially if you want them to guide your country. You want them to have a diverse background and a good understanding and Tom has that. So I will put that link there, check it out. And thank you again for being with us again. It's always lovely and I am sure we'll talk again before the elections. Of course the elections will be here before we know it though. But we will talk again closer and we'll see what's happening. Maybe we'll be surprised by something that happens or comes up. I really don't know. You know, there was a time when I thought when Biden got in that maybe he was going to advocate for health and put Harris in his place and then we'd have the first female minority president. I thought that was an option that they might have been viewing, but that didn't happen. So I'm just saying, who knows what might happen yet before election day? I would not be surprised if we were seriously surprised. Yes, but thank you again for being with us and we will do this again, closer to election and see how things have changed. Thank you very much. Dave, thank you, John. It's been a pleasure. And let's not forget, live long and prosper. Prosper.